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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who recently moved to a part of the US with native palms, a few discoveries that surprised me...

1) Large palms are tough. As in, serious-work-to-pole-saw-through tough. They may looks wispy in the wind, but all of those components (leaves, fruit pods, fruit stalks, leaf shealths) are beyond the strength of an average human to simply pull (tension) apart.

2) Once dried, palm parts are effectively made out of steel.

3) Palms produce a lot of debris. All summer long.

4) Fully developed Queen palm seed stalks are heavy. Maybe 50 lbs?

5) The Sears Tower is actually a 3x3 grid of individual towers, connected in a way that allows for lateral motion. This mimics a palm's trunk structure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Tower#Planning_and_co...

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2. dried fallen palm leaves are extremely dangerous, they are sharp as a knife. I was getting rid of some and it just touched my arm, I now have a 4" scar where it looks like I was trying to self harm.

3. I don't think so, my bamboo or cotton wood trees make so much more debris. At least with palms they are large debris and can easily be tossed.

One thing people don't realize is how much of a pain it is to cut leaves down. I have a chainsaw on a stick that works wonders vs those terrible curved saw things.

4. Dried leaves are highly flammable.

Had to clear a big pile of dried mixed palm and cordyline leaves, and decided to burn them. Big mistake. They're full of oils. Be very careful with that. Annoyingly for the same reason they don't really rot, so getting rid of them can be a pain.

Use them as roofing on a pergola? Mimic what lots of equatorial cultures do.

I had a Chinese Elm tree on my property back in the 90s. Dropped little leaves 365 days a year that got everywhere. I also had a palm tree. The big leaves that fell on occasion were easy to deal with.

> The Sears Tower is actually a 3x3 grid of individual towers, connected in a way that allows for lateral motion. This mimics a palm's trunk structure.

If you are easily frightened, do not go up to the top on a windy day. It sways in the wind like a palm tree (side-to-side 10-15 feet, 3-4 meters). And the creaking noises! If you close your eyes, it is easy to imagine that you are in a tall ship 150 years ago.

To save you the lookup: 50 lbs = ~22.5 kg

Is it just Canadians near the U.S. border that constantly convert temperatures and weights on the fly?

I see replies and bots all over the Internet for this, but I usually have it roughed out already.

Chilean-American here, absolutely. All the time. I still can barely do fahrenheit, and I've come to prefer the American system of feet and inches for human height.

A simple way to think of Fahrenheit is: 0 degrees is just about the coldest a person can stand, and 100 is the hottest.

Oh yeah it comes from body heat.

Mexican near the border here, same.

How much is this in micro-Firkins?

obviously Firkins / 1,000,000. Unless Firkins aren't in sane decimal universe for grownups but one of those feet-to-inches (or miles-to-yard, or feet to X) magical constant ones

everyone knows Firkins are measured in 7-bits. The thing I never can remember is if it is Big-Endian or Little-Endian. things are either quite big or quite small if you get the wrong endianess

Have a couple of palms near the back yard fence and yeah would not want that debris to hit me on the head. From 10m high could be a KO!

I don't get it why cities plant palms along streets: they offer little or no shade and they drop enormous leaves that can hurt people or damage cars.

I grew up in south Florida where all the streets were lined with palm trees. I never heard of a person or car being hurt/damaged by falling palm leaves. It has probably happened, but must be exceedingly rare. Then again, I never saw downed leaves along the roads or any city trucks doing pick up, so now I wonder how and when they were picked up.

Any time I visit areas with palm trees there seems to be a small army of gardeners that maintain all but the “wild” palm trees. Also pretty sure there is a cottage industry of people who harvest the coconuts.

Coconuts? Most palms don't.

I've seen a few fronds down in Southern California (also many palm trees there) - city maintenance picks them up I presume, and if the trees are "maintained" they don't actually drop many (because they get cut before they can fall).

Those are quite tall palm trees you have there

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