The strangely successful history of people mailing themselves in boxes (2015)
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
The song is influential. The more contemporary ‘Undone – The Sweater Song’ by Weezer in 1994 is influenced by The Gift. Also has sleek rock music and a lot of spoken words.
“ Stowaway found in South Africa plane wheel at Amsterdam airport”[1]
Amazing to survive without oxygen and probably not decent clothes at that altitude for that long.
There is thinking that those oxygen masks should be removed from planes. They have likely never saved a life, but they have caused at least one crash after the oxygen generators ignited.
The main point of the oxygen masks though is primarily to keep all passengers alert and ready as it is essential that at all times an evacuation can be performed in under 90 seconds. When the passengers are not able to reason correctly due to hypoxia, that's effectively impossible. This is what could kill you and your fellow passengers if you fail to put on your oxygen mask in a pressurization failure incident.
Which incident are you referring to with the oxygen generators igniting? Not this one I hope?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ValuJet_Airlines_Flight_592
> However, the NTSB quickly determined that just before takeoff, 144[15] expired chemical oxygen generators, each slightly larger than the size of a tennis ball can, had been placed in the cargo compartment in five boxes marked COMAT (company material) by ValuJet's maintenance contractor, SabreTech, in violation of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations forbidding the transport of hazardous materials in passenger aircraft cargo holds.
Because that's not exactly the fault of the ones that were installed on the plane itself.
Well, I certainly didn't. In training (military) I did a pressure chamber day with 33,000ft breathing (lots of fun, do it if you ever get the chance). They took us to 12,000 in a big chamber and then fed us a reduced oxygen via masks to simulate 33,000ft. After about a minute I certainly felt effects, but I was very much awake long long after 15 seconds. I was playing solitaire on an iPad thing. After everyone noticed their personal symptoms they switched us over to pure O2. Some experienced tunnel vision and such. All I ever felt was as slight headache and that I was doing worse at the ipad game. I was awake enough to remember the Sargent who walked up and down the chamber looking us in the eye to see if we were awake. He was scary.
Also, in this thread, I think you all know this, but wanted to make sure - a chemical oxygen generator "burns" to produce oxygen. The exothermic reaction is started with a small explosive; burning means its producing oxygen. Of course, in the 592 crash, they weren't properly packed with heat shielding, so catching other things on fire (plus the excess oxygen) was the cause of the crash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_oxygen_generator
It would make more sense to determine why the incident occurred and modify the design of the oxygen generators to avoid that scenario in the future, which is what I assumed happened.
You can easily hold your breath or stay underwater for longer than 15 seconds.
While they were climnbing they gradually lost consciousness. One of the non flight crew ended up being the only conscious person on board. When his air ran out, he lost consciousness.
The flight ended when all kerosine was used, by flying into a hillside.
The lack of oxygen for a long period though can have severe consequences or even kill someone.
That is at least in the mountain where you need more oxygen as you are moving but staying few hours in any condition at 30-40k feet still does seem a problem to me.
https://climbtallpeaks.com/how-high-can-you-climb-before-you...
SmarterEveryDay did a good video about hypoxia training that demonstrates the very rapid onset and severe effects of hypoxia at cruising altitudes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw
Tangentially related: Duchesne, Utah, wanted to build a railroad station, in the hopes of attracting a railroad. They mailed the bricks for the station to the town, because mail was cheaper than freight rates on wagons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Ghosn#Flight_from_Japan
Thus a gamma device can't be turned on and off, if it's got much energy you need an awful lot of shielding.
I suspect they're talking about scanning *for* gamma radiation, not *with* gamma radiation. As in someone smuggling nuclear materials. (Note, however, that when you're scanning people it's another matter--when you find someone that trips the geiger counter it's probably medical, not nefarious.)
But your medical comment got a laugh out of me because it reminded me when my high school physics teacher came in and held a geiger counter up to himself and it went nuts - turned out he'd just had some sort of scan with radio contrast.
Notably, we had passed through two US airports at 4x and 8x the radioactivity, didn't set off any alarms. Either there weren't detectors, or they were capable of filtering out alarms at that energy level (Tc-99m isn't useful for a bad guy, a detection is always medical.) I find the latter very unlikely when scanning a large area.
Take one of those suicide pods and modify it to support life and shipping and handling...
Obv you are correct, but thats not the answer I was looking for...
I suppose the 'answer' was "how to ship myself in effectively first class for the cost of shipping a box of rocks, as opoosed to a first-class ticket"
---
Sadly, what would the economies of scale be if every first class ticket was a pod insert, as opposed to a seat?
[1] https://www.ups.com/assets/resources/media/en_US/cwt-rates-p...
The real killer (ha) would be finding a way to anesthetize and reawaken the general population in a safe and controlled, yet efficient, way.
"A delegate from the CH to the EU was extinguished due to an apparent oxygen regulator that failed and all 100 of the Chinese Delegation passed during transit due to suffocation"
Though I haven't heard their planes referred to as suicide pods, it's an apt description.
I got to see it recently -- it is fascinating and moving.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4555146/US-parents-...
"At least seven children were stamped, mailed and dutifully delivered by the service between 1913 and 1915"
When (a few decades later) I first started walking to kindergarten as a kid, my mother paid an older (maybe 5th grade) neighbor kid 10 cents a day to make sure I got there & back okay. (It was a bit over 1/2 mile each way, otherwise alone. And 10 cents would easily buy a full-sized candy bar back then.)
https://www.sunjournal.com/2004/08/26/strongcuban-woman-ship...
The article definitely reminded me that What We Do in the Shadows is literally one of the finest pieces of entertainment the world has witnessed.
So I wrote my landlord’s address at the top and my address below it, stamped it and happily posted it.
Sure thing after two days I received in my mailbox my check /facepalm
Who the hell buys toilet paper from Amazon!?
Toilet paper is the one thing I do not want to run out of, so I always have plenty of backup. All of my bathrooms are well-stocked, and I make sure there's spare rolls in the basement.
When I replenish one of my bathrooms, if I'm getting low on spare rolls, I pull out my phone and order more off of Amazon. The price is quite similar to the grocery store, and it's about as easy to order more from Amazon as it is to put it on my shopping list and buy some at the grocery store.
BTW: I'm not as crazy as my parents. At the beginning of the pandemic we all had plenty of backup rolls, but my parents are a little neurotic and had my sister and I looking for their specific brand. (They think their septic tank will explode if they use anything but Scott.) I managed to get a giant box of Scott, with plenty of toilet paper for all three of our households, sent to my house. My parents refused to use it because it was 2-ply instead of 1-ply. When I finally went inside of their house when it was safe, they managed to hoard a 2-year's supply of toilet paper in their basement.
Sadly, this was right before the toilet roll shortage from panic buying before the first UK wave of Covid and she’d give them all away by that point.
Going in person to a warehouse style store like a grocery store or department store is becoming a quaint experience from the past (for us at least).
FWIW I live in a city and don't have a ton of storage space, so getting bulk prices from a warehouse store is impractical. TP and Paper towels come on subscribe and save and are cheaper than the corner store, and roughly the same as the grocery store.
I still shop in person most of the time because I like to pick my produce and the substitutions tend to be a mess, but delivery is great when things are busy or we want a bigger order.
I understand groceries delivered by Instacart etc., but I don't understand ordering bulk non-perishable consumables online when a one time trip to a wholesale store like Sams would be much cheaper and "greener".
TP ships to grocery stores in cardboard boxes too; if you buy the large sizes, they just put the shipping label on that box.
- You don't have to handle the breaking down and disposing yourself.
- How many people doing this are buying 96ct boxes?
- It takes a ridiculous amount of space for last mile delivery especially if they are buying the 96ct box which would be the closest to efficiency of a wholesale store, but still not as good.
I'm not a eco-nazi so I don't really care to squabble over emissions, but it's a bit silly, do people in LA not do wholesale runs a couple times a year for bulk items? It just seems wasteful for the delivery system and yourself, financially and otherwise.
Shipping to a wholesale store is obviously more efficient than to the last mile, I don't see how that's up for debate. Generally you run other errands as well.
At the same time as groceries? No?
In my experience, which I acknowledge is limited to my circle, the only major errand for most households is bulk grocery shopping for the family or shared house. Note that "groceries" here means everything you buy in a big store or cluster of walkably-close stores, so it covers more than just food.
Other journeys in a vehible: A commute maybe, but those are separate journeys from bulk groceries because every household member is going to a different place. Also it's less likely to be in a car. Carrying large shopping bags on a train or bus to another city is not much fun.
Occasionally other trips to social events, see a doctor or whatever, but that's not going to happen in the same trip as bulk groceries.
There is nothing else regular that requires a journey in a vehicle.
Having a delivery driver do a planned circuit to multiple households to deliver bulk groceries is much less driving and pollution than having every household drive to the store and back.
Sure, that last mile is less efficient than shipping to the wholestore store, but that seems irrelevant to the point at hand. It's still much more efficient to do the last mile in a single planned circuit than multiple last miles where everyone goes in and out separately.
I agree Instacart is probably garbage for the environment, because in the suburbs it's often a passenger car delivering for just one household, but that's just equal to the baseline.
They have to resupply. Bulk TP takes up room, a little amount of TP is inefficient.
In no way is getting TP delivered to you ever more efficient than buying from a wholesale store.
You're trying to justify it, for whatever reason. I'm not advocating to banish it, it just seems silly.
> and in a city they're already driving to your building (several times per day if it's big).
Yes they're driving around all day because everyone is buying stuff like TP lol.
- edit to reply below because post limit -
TP is a lightweight, large volume package. The more TP you order more frequently, the less space the truck has, the more amount of resupply trips needed.
The alternative (normal way) I'm proposing is not those cars filling the same void as the truck. It's that you should buy in bulk those items, directly, less frequency and leave more room for mass last mile delivery of items that are small / perishable / unavailable in bulk.
What sort of delivery mode is this statement supposed to defend?
I deleted a lot of text to substitute this simple question: if you wanted to bring toilet paper to all 250 apartments in our building, would you use a passenger car or a truck?
I can either add an item to a grocery list on my phone, or I can just order it from Amazon. I might as well just order it and "be done."
On top of that we live in an apartment building, and a single truck makes deliveries for dozens of, if not a hundred, households (there are 250 units, and multiple trucks arrive each day). Imagine if all of us drove cars to accomplish this instead.