Juno reached Jupiter!

[Kellemora]

As a diabetic I have to watch my carb intake with a microscope.
Since a can of soda is a permanently attached appendage to my arm, I had to find the least deadly of them to drink.
I also have to watch how much sodium I ingest also.

Of all the things to drink out there, way soda?
Because technically, it is the safest way to get your daily amount of fluids, other than drinking purified water which is often more expensive than soda, which is made with purified water.

Way back in the 1950s to 60s, I could tell you exactly what bottling plant bottled or canned Pepsi and what size container it was packaged in, if it came from a bottler within a 100 mile radius of my home.
This was before they began using RO to treat the water they used.
So the flavor difference between specific bottlers was considerably different. That part was easy, and there were only six major bottlers licensed or owned by Pepsi in my area.
The hard part was telling what size and type container the soda was packaged in.
This too changed in later years when all soda was blended the same, regardless of the package it was placed in.

But back in the day, as far as bottled soda went, the same amount of syrup went into 6 and 8 ounce bottles, which were no longer sold, and the same amount of syrup was used in 10, 12, and 16 ounce bottles. So if you normally drank 12 ounce bottles on a daily basis, if it had more kick and was sweeter, it was a 10 oz bottle, if it was weaker it was a 16 ounce bottle.
The same blend as used in a 12 oz bottle was used in a can, but was always fizzier, so if the bubbles tickled your nose, it was probably packaged in a can. 2-liter packaging was always a dead giveaway, very low fizz, and had a different taste, but not medicinal like Choke-A-Cola...

I won many a bets with my little stunt of guessing which bottling plant packaged a soda, and won even more if I got the size right. So it was phun while it lasted. Then they went to RO water and consistent blend so they all tasted pretty much the same after that.

The number of folks contracting cancer has gone up steadily with the amount of chemicals being added to or on our foods.
But you just can't get away from some of them, no matter what you do.

[Icey]

Evening Gary.
*Choke-A-Cola. Ha ha ha!!!!!!! That DOES make it sound bad though.

Yes, sadly, cancers're increasing, and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the expanding population, but the fact that a very high percentage of folk're getting it. Everyone you speak to knows of someone who has, or had it. The locals in our nearest village talk of when someone with cancer was a rarity, and it was the talk of the place if someone had it. Now, a good percentage do, and yet the area hasn't grown much from 50 years ago.

The answer, I'm sure, lies in what we're eating and drinking - as well as possibly what we're breathing in, but no one stands up and says so. Our Food Standards Agency tries to put some control on what is, and what isn't allowed, by looking at scientific surveys which've been handed in. However, no testing has to be actually done by the manufacturers of food additives. They just produce lame paperwork to endorse their reasons for the benefit of these additives, which don't appear to be studied in detail, otherwise they'd see that scientists're very sceptical of many of them. They seem to ignore that tests on animals've shown some very nasty results, but it's "OK", because"X" is in so many other things, and no one's ever died from it, have they? In fact, we ARE doing. Thirty to forty years down the line, I think we're going to reap the repercussions of the folly which's being allowed right now. This's why I'm as careful as possible in what I feed my family on, but you're quite right - we can't escape all of it.

[Kellemora]

When I was doing our genealogy work, prior to my dad's generation, there was not a single death in our family from cancer, and only one marked as TB. But in my dad's generation we had four deaths as a result of cancer, so marked as something like kidney failure or liver failure due to cancer.
Many relatives, cousins and the like, and my own sister have died from cancer in my own generation.
Doing spousal genealogies of their families, I basically found the same thing.

What was surprising is the number of deaths from workplace accidents went down over time, then took a short steep upturn, then dropped back down to the normal decline. I studied up to find why the sharp rise in deaths or serious accidents. They coincided exactly with OSHA beginning to add workplace safety devices. The more safety devices they required, the more non-fatal accidents became. Then over time they settled back down again.

One oddity I did note in our genealogy lists of deaths was the high number of crane accidents. Even among those who did not work on cranes or were not normally around them. At first I though perhaps crane meant some type of illness I was unfamiliar with, but no, it mean real cranes. An uncle who drove a truck for a dry cleaning company was killed when a crane fell over and the boom landed on his truck. He was four blocks away from the construction site too. A cousin died when another small crane tipped over, he worked for a utilities company as a meter reader. Was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Had one cousin as a kid who got stuck in the butt with a hay rake. When he fell off the tractor, everyone though he was a gonner as the rake passed over him. He was darn lucky. However, he never lived down getting gored in the behind by a hay rake, hi hi...

[Icey]

Oh the poor soul!! That couldnt've been too pleasant. : (

I think that some folk're more accident-prone than others, and then you get the ones who're meticulously careful in following safety procedures but who might miss something glaringly obvious and have an accident.

I'd say that by the law of averages, deaths from workplace accidents happen everywhere, but particularly where you have industrial sites, or factories/workshops where you have various machinery going all the time. People become complacent, or safety measures're ignored or not up to scratch. If you have tired workers, this can also create a dangerous environment, so in areas where manual work's carried out by a large workforce, the odds of accidents, resulting in death or not, must be higher than normal.

[Kellemora]

Back home, OSHA made a printing company place a guard they designed on one of the presses.
An employee lost his fingertips in the press.
OSHA was there to see how it happened, and the boss showed them, ended up losing his fingers too.
The guard prevented the users from seeing the position of the continuously moving press rollers, so they had no way of timing when to do whatever it is they have to do after each pass.

In our business, we had to use a guard on our knives, which made them more dangerous to use.
Thankfully, after we proved the people who though we needed guards didn't know how to use a knife in the first place, they dropped the requirement. Good thing too, because I could see the turmoil if they began to hit Chef's in their kitchens with such a dumb requirement.

[Icey]

Accidents happen whether security measures're put into place or not.

A friend told me about someone who got the ends of 2 fingers chopped off as he was loading paper into an electronic guillotine. A guard was supposed to come down when he removed his hands from the machine after stacking it with paper, and then he'd press a button for the job to be done. Something went wrong, and the blade came down before he could entirely remove his hand. Ouch!

[Kellemora]

Since it was a guillotine, were they able to sew his fingers back on?

Only asking because we had a bulk stem cutter at the flower shop, and one of the workers managed to cut off a finger above the first knuckle, and they were able to sew it back on and add a splint. It took a couple of years for the hard stitch line to finally dissolve, but after that his finger worked just fine. This was way back in the late 1960s too.

But a smashed finger is not usually salvageable.

Uncle John got his thumb into a sawblade once, but didn't lose it. The doc just packed all the meat back in and stitched him up. Took over five years before it was back to normal again. He didn't hit the bone.

[Icey]

Shudder at the thought of those type of accidents Gary.

I don't know about the guy who got caught in the guillotine. I would've thought that a straight clean cut might've been salvageable, but I didn't hear any more about him, except that he was back into work the next day, bandaged up! I hope he sued.

[Kellemora]

Sue maybe the company who made the device if it failed to work properly.

[Icey]

Yes, but I would've thought that the place where he worked might've been in for the high jump as well, since machinery's supposed to be kept up to inspection and safety standards maintained. However, "supposed to be" and what actually happens, seem to be two different things.

[Kellemora]

I've had a few machines over the years that had serious problems right out of the box.
In some cases, the problems were directly due to horrible design parameters.

Almost every mechanical device ever invented has something seriously wrong with the design.
A minor improvement to the design would have made it a hundred times better.
Even if they know this, they still have to sell X number of the first design before they can release a newer design, even if the first design can be dangerous to the users.

Another problem today is manufacturers purposely make barely functional products, either to claim they are safer, or to prevent lawsuits if they made them the right way and something went wrong.

An excellent example of this is the STINGER brand Bug Zappers. I'll pick on their 1/2 acre model here.
But first let me tell you how a bug zapper is supposed to work, and it's not how STINGER makes their bug zappers.

All bug zappers have a twin grid system. It's like touching both sides of an electrical wire, you will get zapped.
How far apart you keep the two grids will determine what size bugs will get zapped, if the system relies only on contact between both grids.

The best bug zappers have a high inductance to keep the grid clean, and a high capacitance so contact does not need to be made to both sides of the grid. A bug small enough to fly between the two grids without touching either wire will get zapped, because they themselves cause an arc to fire through them.

When the capacitance is set this high, there is another problem which must be overcome. Like that of striking an arc with a welding rod. Once the arc is struck it will continue, even if you hold the welding rod a good distance from the steel it was struck against to start the arc.
So, a bug causing the arc to start, must have a way of stopping the arc before it can damage the unit. A simple electrolytic capacitor will store the energy needed to create an arc when the field between the two poles is interrupted by something flying between them. However, a properly sized capacitor will also instantly discharge to create the arc, and have to build up it's charge again. So the arc also ceases instantly after the bug is zapped.

In other words, it is not hard to build a bug zapper the right way so it does the job it is supposed to do. Unfortunately the STINGER engineers have cheapened their product to the point it barely works with positive contact to both poles, and does not work at all if contact is not made between both poles.

Yet somehow they managed to get the public to buy their under powered, barely working units, to the point they are considered a top seller in the industry.
One would think with all the years they have been in business, they would have learned how to build a proper functioning bug zapper. But why should they? People buy them anyhow because they recognize the name, and have no idea HOW a bug zapper is supposed to work. When a big bug hits it, it goes pow sizzle pop, and people think it's doing its job, when in reality, it is missing all the small annoying insects, like gnats and juvenile mosquitoes.

OK, off my soapbox.

[Icey]

In the UK, electrical items made here or in the EU (so to speak!) have to satisfy certain safety standards. As a manufacturer, you are responsible for ensuring the electrical equipment you make meets the safety requirements, and for declaring this. This includes three main elements - technical documentation, EC DoC (a Declaration of Conformity to say that the product meets the requirements of the directives which apply to it) and affixing a CE mark.

I hear what you're saying about insect zappers, but we have 2 outdoor ones, sited near the rear door entrance. These seem to work really well. On the instruction leaflet, it stated that the unit'd been independently tested and certified to RoHS (the restriction of hazardous use) as well as all relevant European standards. These weren't even particularly expensive gadgets (less than 40 dollars each).

[Kellemora]

We have Underwriters Laboratories who test all things electric and electronic here and provide a UL classification if they pass the safety tests. Like most things here though, what passes and what doesn't has a lot to do with how much money is involved.

Many eons ago, I built a device to convert a car or truck alternator output to 110 volts to drive things like drills, power tools, vacuum cleaners, etc. But not TVs or Electronics. Any motor that used Brushes, which at the time was nearly every power tool made, could be run from my device.

It was built using all UL approved components in a UL approved enclosure. Even so, the completed device was not approved by UL. Why should it be? Every part it was made with was already approved. We probably sold a few thousand of these before we received a cease and desist letter for selling a non-approved device. I could never afford their fee for testing a device, so decided to take the cheaper route and file a suit in court to reverse the letter. Although I did win the case, sorta, I was still not allowed to sell the device without their sticker, however, since every component was already UL approved, the court ordered I get an assembled with all UL approved parts sticker. This still cost a considerable amount of money, but at least it was affordable, because sales on backorder pending the outcome would cover the cost with ease.
We sold the design to another company within a couple of months who made a much fancier unit, at a much higher price too.

As far as bug zappers go, I really miss the one I had back home. Even a tiny gnat who could easily fly between the grid wires would get zapped. I've not found any make or model since then that worked so well. Heck, I even have gnats in my office a couple of times per year. Have no idea where they come from, or what attracts them. But the old zapper (if I still had it) would have eliminated them in a day or less.
Now I just use those long sticky tape things. I buy an odor free, no pesticide type, and get ten of them for a buck. They don't attract the gnats, but they seem to land on them by accident and get stuck permanently, hi hi...
When I was raising plants in the crawl space I dug out, about once a year I would have hundreds of super sized horse flies suddenly appear. They would swam back and forth under the rows of lights over the plants. I had something similar to those sticky tapes I would place horizontally under the lights overnight. Next day I would dispose of them, because they were loaded. Only took two nights of doing this before I was fly free again for another year.

[Icey]

Hey - that was a great idea! Horse flies can give a nasty bite. I've never seen a super-sized one, and wouldn't want to, but I wouldn't appreciate being in a room with one, let alone hundreds!

Yes, those sticky tape things DO catch unwanted insects, but however much I despise flies, I don't like to see them trapped there, wriggling away without much chance of escape, and I think they look gross when they have a number of bodies stuck to them, but they're better than using sprays. The electronic zappers can also do unintended damage by killing the"good guys", such as bees. We also have some precious moths in the garden, and although these particular ones aren't overly attracted by light like most of them are, I know that when a loud buzz's heard, the gadget's got another big insect.

[Kellemora]

Bees are very important to our survival, and also important to plants as well. Without them many plants don't get pollinated.
Some plants can be artificially pollinated, like hothouse tomatoes, but it's better to raise them in outdoors and let the bees do their work. We had a few ranges of greenhouses where we propagated clover and kept bees so we had an early start on some plants. I never went down in those greenhouses very often because the supervisors for them were mean to everyone who came near.

Besides the bees, we also had thousands, if not millions of red earthworms. We didn't have to worry about folks trying to cob them for fishing because they didn't grow large enough to use on a hook. Nevertheless, with tons of fishermen around, we also kept a large area down between the barns properly mulched and treated so night-crawlers would propagate like wildfire. We didn't allow anyone to dig for worms, as we had wind powered vibrapoles to bring them to the surface. Like the little windmill toys with a character that beats on something. All it takes is a steady thump thump thump and the worms come to the surface to complain about the noise, hi hi...

[Icey]

I think you'll find that worms come to the surface when they sense a tapping because they think it's rain, and could drown. Birds know this, so listen and sense movement beneath them, then hop around the area or peck at the topsoil in the hope that worms might surface. Nature's wonderful like this.

I totally agree about bees. In fact, they're vital to our survival. Even though I'm allergic to their stings, I'd never intentionally kill a honey or bumblebee. They don't usually hurt you anyway, only if they feel threatened, or you happen to inadvertently trap one by placing your arm down on top of a resting one without noticing it, etc.

Some plants use the wind to pollinate, and bees aren't the only insects to benefit them, but in the main, that's their job, and many thousands of plants and trees'd die without their assistance.

[Kellemora]

We didn't have destructive bees back home like they have down south here.
We have carpenter bees, which are huge and make holes in all things wood.
At least a bee will use the same hole year after year, but they multiply and make more holes.
I haven't bothered them, and let them have their way on some of my wood structures, like my greenhouse.
But when they were getting after my eaves, I had to have a guy come and install plastic or aluminum over places they were getting to. Now, all of my soffit and facia are covered with aluminum or plastic.
So they took to using my greenhouse again, hi hi...

[Icey]

Oh dear! Sorry to hear about your greenhouse, and yes, carpenter bees'll sometimes return to the same nest year after year. They don't seem to bother you too much, but they're destructive, as you say. It's a pity, because they aren't usually aggressive, but just want to go about their business chewing a gallery round your woodwork!!
Have you tried filling the holes Gary? Once you do, a carpenter won't try and gnaw its way out of the nest. It'll just stay there, and either leaver via another exit, or sadly die.

[Kellemora]

Yes, I've caulked a few holes, but they just dug them out again.
I figure as long as they just eat the greenhouse now that we covered all wood on the house, it's not so bad.
The hailstorm busted it up real bad, and I did put a new roof on, but it still has the holes in the side panels.
But all is not lost. I have a couple of pellet rifles and can shoot through the holes at steel targets in my yard.
The type of pellet rifles I have you have to cock by breaking the barrel and stock in half. This is good for building upper body strength instead of going over to the hospital and using their machines for same. Plus it's more phun!

[Icey]

Oh bless you! Love the way you incorporate fun with your exercise!

I'm amazed that those carpenters've had a second go at any holes that you might've filled in, but I was told that latex wood filler's better than using caulk, which can shrink or not be flush to the wood?