I Stopped Grounding | Hacker News Reader

I Stopped Grounding

exfatloss.com

10 pointspaulpauper6 comments

Oddly enough, I've actually researched this topic (and the related "earthing") a lot. It's interesting because there's a surprising amount of research that seems to find positive effects. These results are reinforced by some popular "science" news (sometimes with a remarkable resemblance to pure esotericism).

However, if you dig deeper, you'll find a lot of flaws in these studies. Either suspicious financial conflicts of interest, very small sample groups, confident conclusions despite large error bars, neglect of other influences (such as being more active and outdoors while "earthing"), or just different results between similar studies.

Most studies without obvious flaws or misleading interpretations conclude that much more testing is needed before any useful statement can be made about the effectiveness of grounding/earthing.

"If you hang around alternative health Twitter"

That's your problem right there.

You know what they call alternative medicine that works?

Medicine.

Good article exploring some woo - this part made me LOL:

"...in the stone age, we used to walk largely barefoot on the bare ground..."

Nope. Our ancestors were not idiots, and minor injuries could easily become fatal, so they created and wore shoes when necessary. At least 100,000 years ago [1]

[1] https://phys.org/news/2023-10-earliest-evidence-flip-flops-m...

This is a common trope in superficial historical contextualizing. People who wanna ground their essays in chronological fashion often project their ideas of a supposed primitive past contrasted to a 'modern way' that is rarely more than what they imagine makes sense.

You see that a lot with histories of money projecting this idea of a mythical past where people had to do cumbersome bartering before someone had an idea to invent money, which has no factual basing in history. There's evidence of monies and credit for as long as we have had writing.

I wonder how much I could charge for a copper ground rod, a length of bare copper, and some aluminum plate.

“Guaranteed 25 ohms of resistance to ground or less!”

I’m thinking $2500, extra ground rods are $500 each.

This has been a very long time - 60-70 years - but there's an urban legend of a well-recognized professor of physiology who was carrying out experiments that involved tiny voltages. He couldn't get a good enough ground to wipe out noise. So he bought a 4'x8' (1200x2400 mm, roughly; the size of standard drywall) sheet of copper and had it buried outside his building to provide a nice, steady ground. Soldered to a big fat cable going up to his lab.

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