Not An Inch to Spare

[yogi]

At one time in my early life I was as big a fan of television watching as anybody. There were inane shows I actually enjoyed watching and looked forward to the next one. My earliest recollections are of people like Bob Hope, Ed Sullivan, Jackie Gleason, George Burns, Groucho Marx, Abbot & Costello, and the list of old timers goes on and on. These people were actually entertaining. Each one of them, however, fell victim to their times. They all came out of an era in which television did not exist. A lot of them adapted well to television, although I must admit Hopalong Cassidy didn't look as I pictured him on the radio. LOL

Those were the the good ol' days, but I realize they are OLD and not in tune with what is going on today. For one thing all those old timers are dead now. Also, the style of entertainment has changed over the decades. Reality shows have replaced variety shows. At some point Ben Cartwright lost his glitter and entertainment value for me. So did most of the rest. At that point I decided television was not as useful for entertainment as it once had been. I then changed my focus to using that resource for learning instead of entertainment. PBS was about the only network where that was possible, but then another reality hit me in the face one day. PBS has an agenda even if it doesn't have official sponsors - they have supporters instead. About the same time as I was disheartened with public television, it became intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that the news broadcasts weren't exactly reporting unbiased news.

I took up a hobby, astrology, and turned it into a paying pastime. The money was not the attraction. I was actually learning things about people first hand. Their incentive to tell me all about it was the horoscope, but I knew the limitations of that too. It was a transition period in my never ending quest to entertain myself and died off when we moved to a new location and computers were becoming available to the general public. Once I got the knack of computer networks, that was the end of my interest in television altogether. I was now able to interact with the news sources directly which I considered a step up from the one way stream of brainwashing offered by the boob tube. Computing is now my primary source of entertainment and sanity. It turns out to be educational as well. Television has evolved into a propaganda machine and a tool of the government. They may only have one network under their wing for now but the media has become a weapon used by clever power mongers to promote their agendas. It's impossible to avoid it all, but I am doing a great job of keeping my distance.

[Kellemora]

I loved all the old shows too, but never really did watch much TV, I was too busy doing other things growing up.
After marriage and kids I was normally always working, trying to make ends meet.
And such was life for numerous years. My only hobby back then was Ham Radio which carried over to the computer age.
My move south really caused major changes in my lifestyle too.
I never did set my Ham Radio station up down here, which is a shame because I now live on top of a mountain, which is the ideal spot for a Ham. But like you, Computers have taken over my life.
I am in my office usually from before 8 am, and other than lunch and dinner, I don't head back down to the house until around 9:30 pm. I'm at the keyboard all that time, doing something.
I may have to stop to do something else for a short time every so often, like mow the grass or fill an order, or complete a job on the Honey-Do List, hi hi. But other than that, here I am.

[yogi]

it is said that a lot of the inventions we see are extensions of human abilities. Cars, for example, give our legs a rest while we travel great distances. Computers are an extension of the brain, and in fact they are build on a pattern known to exist between our ears. It's hard to describe, but it is possible to form relationships with unseen people merely by exchanging data bits. I've known people to fall in love over the Internet before they ever met in real life. You and I have established a friendship similar to what two old codgers would have talking to each other over their back yard fences. Using my computer I have seen things, learned things, and met people I could never do in reality. It truly is mind expanding in my case. Those one way communication media no longer appeal to my senses. They haven't for a long time.

[Kellemora]

Again I have to agree with you Yogi!
I met Debi on-line, way back on January 4, 2001.
Went to visit her twice, and she came to visit me once.
While she was here on our third face to face meeting together, I proposed atop the Gateway Arch.
We tentatively scheduled a date near the end of April or the beginning of May to get married,
But all the places were already booked up. Then out of the clear blue sky, we landed the most impossible date to get.
Due to the way the desktop calendars were made, every person and company needed for a JUNE 1st date were open.
June is usually booked three years ahead of time, and here we landed that date with only like five weeks to spare.
The only 5 star restaurant with a ballroom was open, as was the concert pianist we hired to play during dinner.
The pastor who planned on retiring said he would do one last wedding before doing so, ours.
Everything we needed in the way of flowers, church services, limo ride (one way) and brides dresses were all ready on time.
So miracles do happen my friend, hi hi. We've been very happily married now for over 19 years!

Now I have a sad note to add.
I started revamping one of my websites back in 2017. And although I uploaded it with stuff on it I didn't want, I never got back to finishing the project. In fact, I couldn't even find the working file I was working on, equivalent to the one I uploaded. I thought that was strange also. I booted up an old computer that overheats in a matter of minutes and found my file. Why it wasn't saved to the external surprised me. In any case, I managed to copy the file I needed, and had just started looking at other files when the computer overheated again and shut down. Here I thought it was the power supply that was bad, but managed to copy over the boot log file also. It shows the CPU fan is not running. So maybe I can stick a new fan in it and have it working again. I hope that is all it is. I think this is the computer with the broken fan blade too so it vibrated when it ran, and probably ate up the bearings. I'll see if I have time to open it.
OK, now for the sad news: I looked at the file, and I assume I must have had an attack sometime since late 2017 and early 2019. My website code page looked like Greek to me, so many commands I didn't recognize at all.
Looked back at an old normal HTML website code page, and I understood some of it. Looked at an XHTML page, and understood some of it, looked back at HTML5 code page and I don't recognize any of those commands at all.
A little bit of hunting and I remembered I did it using Bootstrap CSS and after checking on-line, that is where those commands came from, but what they do, I will have to study and learn them all over again. I hope I can, they seem simple enough, not like chemistry or electronics, just plain simple code I should be able to learn all over again, I hope.

And that is how my day has gone so far, hi hi.

[yogi]

Your choice of marriage dates was a stroke of genius. Up in Chicago you would not have been as lucky, but you might have had a few more choices. I'm basing my comment only on the fact that there are many more people getting married in the Windy City than in St Loo, and some of them would have noticed the anomaly in the calendar as you did. I don't get the attraction to June; I do understand wanting fairly decent weather but there are a few of those kind of months to choose from. We picked September. I should say, my wife of many years and her mother picked September. LOL I had no preference and since they were paying I just went along for the free meal. September can be iffy in the weather department. We were fortunate to have a beautiful autumn day for a wedding. The honeymoon that followed was up in Wisconsin where the weather was not so kind. Then again, honeymooners don't worry about those kind of things.

I have to sympathize with you regarding the web site you are rebuilding. My knowledge of epilepsy isn't much more than what you already told me about it. It seems you have a problem with retention and not a problem with learning. For you that would be good news in that you can quickly re-learn what you apparently forgot. The only down side is that you do indeed need to study what you already learned in the past.

Bootstrap CSS is great in that you don't need to know a lot of the things you may be required to understand if you were building a site from the ground up. It's an environment that is pre-made. All you need to understand is how to call the function for what you want to accomplish. That should not be a problem for you given that you do recognize quite a bit of the regular code. The gods only know how frustrating a re-education can be. I spent several weeks trying to understand UEFI that seemed deliberately made to be nonfunctional. In my case the missing links were simple once discovered, but it was a humongous effort getting to the point of understanding what questions I needed to ask in the first place. For you most of the groundwork is in place. You have a website and it's at least partially coded correctly. You just need to fill in the blank spots. I know it's frustrating, yet I"m confident you can do it. A lot of people our age are clueless when it comes to websites.

[Kellemora]

Married my first wife November 8, 1968
The second one on April 1st, 1981
We couldn't think of a better day to get married considering all the circumstances.
Both of our families wanted to disown us. Her family and relatives were all Jewish, and my side was all Catholic.
She converted to Baptist, and I was non-denominational at the time.
We got married in a Rabbi's office first for her side of the family, then over to the Baptist Church for my side of the family.
An amazing thing happened also. Her sisters husband, who did not go to his own daughters wedding, showed up at the wedding and reception with his whole family, including his daughter and her hubby. We though fireworks would fly for sure, but everyone had a good time at the reception. Although my family sat out for most of the Jewish dances, hi hi.
Married Debi June 1st, 2001.
People were mighty leery about that, because Ruth had just passed away in November of 2000.
They thought it was too soon for their niece and cousin to jump into a marriage of a widower.
I got more lectures from her family members than Carter's has pills.
But then on our first anniversary, nearly all of her relatives made a comment that caught on among all of them.
Boy are we all glad WE'ALL married you, hi hi. Somebody must have told them Mikey Likes Me, hi hi.

I really don't think it was my epilepsy this time. Although when I have an attack, I normally only lose what I had to learn by hard study, but it is always replaced with something I didn't understand, like going from an electronics whiz to the ability to create a product that required an understanding of chemistry, which is something I never understood or knew anything about.
After an attack and I couldn't work on gaming machines anymore, my boss sent me back to Williams/Bally training school and for some reason, I just couldn't get it, it just went over my head el zippo.

Although I said looking at my HTML5 pages with the bootstrap CSS commands looked like Greek to me yesterday.
I picked back up enough by just looking at my bootstrap made index page and following what each thing was doing.
Plus I looked up the unfamiliar commands on-line at W3C and they started coming back.
So in this case, what I forgot was simply a use it or lose it scenario.
I had not worked on my websites since 2015, except for making a small simple change on one in 2017 which was basically just a cut n paste into an area already set up for the purpose of adding things easily.
I still will have to study up more to do what I want to do now, since I've never done that before on any of my web pages.
I could use a web builder program, but I don't really like to do that.
As an aside: How I learned HTML in the first place was to convert a msWORD document to HTML and look to see what it did. It didn't take me long to figure out the way msWORD did it was quite convoluted, but I did learn enough from it I could rewrite the whole website by hand using only a simple text editor and it worked.
But then times changed and I had to be more precise about how I did things, so when I redid my websites using XHTML/CSS I learned a lot and they came out perfect.
Times changed again and with everything MOBILE now, I had to compress all my images, minify my HTML, and also make it all user friendly. Got that done, and then it was time to do everything in HTML5, which I why I finally decided to use bootstrap CSS that already had all the fancy things I needed already worked out for me. And it was open so I could remove what I didn't need if I really wanted my own CSS, which I never did.

Would you believe I still hit BIG commercial websites today that are still HTML/Transitional.
Unbelievable to say the least.
I often looked at websites to see how they did something. That worked in the early years, but not since CSS, and also many big websites are actually using PHP to write the HTML for the display of the website, so you learn nothing from those at all.

Have a great day Yogi!
It snowed here, and it Figures, I have a doctors appointment today, hi hi.
My car is buried under my neighbors hedge that the snow laid down over my car.
The drivers side too! Annoying!

[yogi]

I've heard that story a few times where the family is judgmental about one of it's own marrying somebody who might be on the rebound. It can be a time for making bad decisions, but as you and Deb proved that's not always the case. A lot depends on the emotional maturity of the couple and how realistic they are willing to be about their future. While family inputs might be removed from the circumstances, they are hardly unbiased. You and Deb obviously made the right decisions and what better endorsement can you have than one from Mikey?

Many people who study the subject say that memories are never lost. They do not get stored with the same detail as is present in the original event, however. Thus when an old memory gets recalled the missing parts are filled in by areas of the brain which have seen similar things in the past; concepts. Then, THAT altered form is stored for future reference. Thus it gets fuzzier and fuzzier each time you recall a given memory unless you do something to recreate the original event. That's basically how the "use it or lose it" process works. Pathological problems can and do alter the process and at times the paths for recall are broken or altered. The basic memory stays in tact but it can't be fully or accurately recaptured. Since you can recall things after some effort, it suggests nothing is broken permanently. Like me, you are just getting older.

Using web page construction programs can be useful. They are perfect for the novice. People with some experience, however, want to do things their way. You can still use an automated process to generate pages and then go in and clean it up. That will make a poorly written page more efficient, but it will still be a poorly written page. I doubt that anybody still uses IE6, but the transitional HTML that worked well on those browsers is still around in copious quantities. You can't just discount all those webpages that have been eclipsed by modern HTML methods. Thus, "BIG" still works. LOL

Yesterday, Monday, was the snow day here in O'Fallon. It was part of the same system that crossed over Knoxville. Altogether we had about two inches of the white stuff, then the temps headed south. When I got up this morning right at sunrise the outside weather station was recording a reading of 7F. It came up quickly to the high teens but much of the snow is crusted over with ice. Our driveway being in the shadows most of the day is iced snow while the neighbors across the street have concrete visible. Also, last night a meteor passed over our house, literally. A few key cameras caught it and the pictures are stunning. Apparently it exploded and shook up a few buildings. Oddly enough, my wife noted it but I did not. It was like a bolt of lightning that lit the sky with the accompanying sonic boom. I'm still not sure why I missed it.

[Kellemora]

Mikey is from an old TV commercial for Cereal I think. Kids sitting around the table afraid to try a new cereal, then the youngest kid starts chomping down on it like its the best thing since bacon, hi hi. The other kids say Mikey Likes It, then they chomp down on the cereal.

We got down to 14 degrees here last night. What St. Louis gets, we usually get three days later and usually ten degrees warmer. We too have 2 inches of snow, and it is not melting this time, temp right now is only 21 degrees here.

We saw a single bright meteor looking north toward Chicago from here. I guess that's the same one you guys saw in St. Louis. It was really bright, then a flash, then a small trail as it burned out. Really Neat!

[yogi]

i know exactly who Mikey is/was. Those were the days when television was still amusing to me and I'd even watch the commercials. Just for old times sake, here it is ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYEXzx-TINc

There are a lot of videos of that meteor circulating and I read one comment where it was thought to have exploded near Lake St Louis. Since they aren't making a big deal about finding it, I'm assuming that comment was speculation. The story is quite interesting but it reminds me of the way I think this planet will be extinguished. Some meteor that was not being tracked by anybody will hit Yellowstone National Park and set off an earthquake that will release the volcanic pressures percolating there. This will annihilate most of Wyoming instantly and take out the rest of the earth by turning the atmosphere into volcanic soot that hangs around for a few decades. Not even the cockroaches will survive.

[Kellemora]

Awesome, I always loved that commercial!

My house sits at an angle so what I think is due north is usually east a little more.

There is a lot more volcanic activity now than we've seen in quite a few years.
Didn't one in Russia just blow its top yesterday or the day before.

When one considers the number of nuclear power plants that now span the globe, when they start to go, we will all be gone then too. Or as you said, a rogue meteor too big for us to destroy before it hits will get us some day too.
Hopefully I'll be long gone before then.

[yogi]

I think the nuclear power plants in existence, and any yet to be built, will be the least likely things to upset the balance of Nature here on planet earth. Some wild eyed dictator with a collection of nuclear weapons that start a chain reaction of retaliatory responses would be my first guess for an accidental demise. I also think there is a better chance of intercepting an incoming missile than there is of hitting an asteroid headed for downtown NYC. Missiles are also a bit more predictable. Like the extinction event for dinosaurs, I think our final assault will be a surprise from the outside.

I follow an earthquake tracking service on Twitter and there are a few significant ones every week. Traditionally the movement of the earth's crust has been slow but there are a few places where a "big" shift is long overdue. California is one nearby. If one of those big shifts does occur I don't think it would by itself end life on earth. The resulting volcanic activity might.

[Kellemora]

We had a relative who lived in Washington. Their lively hood was farming holly.
After Mount St. Helen's erupted in 1980, even though they were not that close to it.
The ash falling from the sky killed all of their bushes and what little livestock they did own.
The weight of the ash collapsed their barn and caved in the roof of their production buildings.
They lost literally everything. They were insured, but not enough to start over again.
The sold their house and moved down to Oregon, using most of their money to buy the house and a small greenhouse business which only raised some type of tea rose, and as a side operation they raised herbs for a couple of food processing plants. It wasn't but about 8 or 10 years later that some other catastrophic event put them out of business, I don't remember if it was an earthquake or super large snowfall. But they were old enough by then they simply retired and moved into a small Condo.
In the 71 years we owned greenhouses, we were only wiped out twice, both times by major hailstorms.
The way insurance works, you can either cover the glass or the crops, but not both.
We usually took the money for the glass since it had to be replaced first, and then tried to salvage what we could by taking cuttings of the plants we kept in the protected areas.
Those were mighty slim years following each of those hailstorms. We almost didn't recover!

[yogi]

Natural disasters are probably the hardest to deal with because there isn't much that can be done to prevent them. The current global warming trend is responsible for increasing the number of those natural disasters. I know that I've personally seen some the the largest storms in my lifetime since I've lived here in Missouri. Then again, I've not had access to all the weather data that I do now with my fancy computers.

Most of the time our cars are in a garage. I've seen what hail damage does to cars that are not protected; it's impossible to repair hundreds of little dings on the roof and hood. No wonder insurance won't cover it. When it comes to crops, I guess farmers can get insurance for that. But as you say it's pretty lean pickings even if some of the losses can be recovered.

I remember the gray skies up in the Chicago area that were attributed to Mt St Helens blowing her top. It seemed as if it only lasted a few days, but I'm sure some of the debris is still floating around out there somewhere. I've also read where air traffic over Europe was affected when some volcano in Iceland blew up. While they were all significant eruptions, none were on the scale of what could happen if Yellowstone goes.

[Kellemora]

My original Blazer was really torn up by the hailstorm, as was the frau's Jimmy.
I sold the Jimmy with a new transmission and rear end to an employee at the service shop who always worked on it.
Then bought the 2002 Blazer she's now driving with a new engine.
I did manage to pop many of the hail dents out of my Blazer in places I could get to easily. Then used a suction popper on several others until it broke, hi hi. I had always maintained it in perfect condition, so it was a shame it got totaled.
Took me a year to find another identical one, which I now drive. The only difference is mine had a gray interior and this one has a black interior, everything else is exactly the same.
I still miss my original one though!

I've seen some of the biggest snow storms, and hardest ice storms in recorded history during the years I lived in St. Louis County. And although they keep talking about global warming, since moving south I've seen them break the cold record several times since I moved here.
A friend who lives in central California has seen both the hottest temps and the coldest temps of record in the past few years.

Although we know the planet has been warming up since the peak of the last ice age, one thing never mentioned is the climatic shift, which has nothing to do with global warming or cooling.
The average mean temperature in one area is rising, while in another area is dropping from their normal readings.
This seems to happen along with the wobble cycle of the earth also.
The only thing scientists really have to go on are the core samples they take from certain areas, but they only show the climate in those areas over thousands of years, not tens of thousands of years.
Given enough time, the mountains are eroding away, as are the land masses, and the only places all that stuff ends up is in the oceans, so naturally there will be a measurable ocean rise. Most of it is from the silt and dirt that washes into the ocean, not necessarily from melting glaciers. Heck, in some areas the glaciers are growing and the ice packs getting larger.

[yogi]

Global warming is ... global. What you have described in the past and above are land surface phenomena. 70% of the planet is covered with water which itself is increasing in temperature. This heated ocean water also affects the air above it. All this hot air heads north to the Arctic via the California coastline. The North Pole has been in fact at record high temperatures for most of the decade - it's been above freezing a few times. The polar vortex is being displaced and pushed into the central portion of Canada and the United States, which is indeed experiencing colder than normal weather. The Arctic permafrost is melting and there are satellite pictures showing the extent of such over time. I suppose some of that water can be absorbed into the frozen tundra, but most of it is ending up in the ocean. There are areas in the Antarctic that are increasing in snow and ice, but much of the shoreline is experiencing the same melting as is happening at the north pole. That water is going someplace too.

When the air temperatures from all over the globe are measured, it can clearly be seen that four of the last five years were the hottest on record. That's not to say it's hotter than it ever was. There can be little doubt that warming is taking place. The cause for such is often debated in political terms as well as scientific terms. I recognize that everyone chooses which they prefer to accept.

[Kellemora]

Unfortunately, we do not have the records for temperatures for the ice age previous to the one we are currently on the downhill side of. So we really don't know if we are warmer than the downhill side of previous ice ages, nor do we know how hot it will get when we finally reach the valley of the current ice age. Although we do have a rough idea of how cold it will be when we climb toward the peak of the next ice age.

I don't trust anything any poly-TICK-ian says, because they are not scientists.
They take an event, use it as a scare tactic in order to gain more control over the people, raise taxes, add licensing and fees to those they allow to keep doing it, and fines for those who don't do it their way. And in most cases, they are in reality making matters worse.

I trust the scientists a little bit more, but which ones? While one group of scientists are saying one thing, another group is saying just the opposite. Seems to me they say what they need to in order to get more funding and government grants to study some problem they made up, or turned an existing situation into a major problem using the same scare tactics as the poly-TICK-ians.

I can find documentation from NASA showing that the ice caps are growing, and documentation from them showing the ice caps are melting. Which document is correct? Again, contradicting information from the same organization.

You would never believe the piles of contradicting information I've accumulated here from the American Lung Association, American Cancer Society, National Academy of Medicine, and several others, concerning smoking.
The one thing I have learned is not a single organization I've contacted has ever done a study on tobacco.
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute appears to have more accurate information than any organization out there trying to get donations to their research. But even they do not have any available data on the affects of tobacco. They say they do, but the tests clearly show the only tests they have made were on manufactured cigarettes.
Right now I have about 15 to 18 people all seeking the same information and not finding it from any reputable source.

Time for me to go eat before I starve to death over here, hi hi.

[yogi]

We live in an "information age" where the data of any type is overwhelming. A lot of that information travels along the public network which has the innate problem of being the carrier of raw data. The mix of reliable and unreliable in with the expert and opinionated presents a challenge to any investigator. How do you sort it all out to get something useful? Defining what is useful is a problem onto itself. While it all may seem chaotic, it is possible to refine the raw data. Doing that takes a bit of work which most people are not willing to do. Think of how useful computers are, for example, yet how few people actually know how they work or how to use them properly.

The usual best practice is to obtain a large number of samples and determine the mean. While that works well in statistics it's a little more difficult to do in something like climate analysis. I certainly don't know enough about meteorology or climate to make expert judgements about the data I collect. However, I can recognize the scientific methods used by some people and the agenda driven political data for what they are. There is clear evidence and general agreement that the climate is changing more rapidly than we had hoped it would a decade or two ago. It's that rapid change that concerns a lot of the people who study climate. The contributions to the rapid change are numerous and our human efforts to pollute the environment correlate with the rate of change. Correlation does not prove causation, however, and that's the reason you and I are debating it.

When it comes to cigarette smoking the same kind of questions arise as do about climate change. Both sound like they are bad ideas, but are they really? Whether you are smoking straight tobacco or a manufactured cigarette, it's hard to see how taking smoke into your lungs can be a healthful activity. Smoke in the lungs makes them dysfunctional at least on a temporary basis. But, is that bad, or possibly neutral in it's effects? The answer to that question is the same as the answer to asking what's so bad about climate change? The wrong question is being asked! Smoking and changing weather patterns are not good or bad by nature. They are simply events that happen. The way to approach an investigation is to try and determine if there are any measurable or observable effects related to said smoking or changes in weather patterns. If a cause and effect observation can be made that is the end of it. The perceived benefits or detriments are all personal opinion and outside the realm of critical thinking. How you evaluate the evidence about smoke in your lungs should not be part of the question. Given the number of people who die from severe weather, perhaps it is important to know if it is possible to do something about it.

[Kellemora]

Smoking isn't healthy at all, all I was saying was manufactured cigarettes are worse than organic tobacco with no additives. But neither are considered healthy.

I have to be to the doctor in 15 minutes, so will catch up tomorrow!

[yogi]

My observations came as a result of an assumption, which is always a bad way to draw conclusions. When you told me you and a dozen other people you know were searching for research data regarding tobacco, it occurred to me that you all may be looking for a "scientific" justification to ingest smoke. Because tobacco is big business there is little doubt in my mind that the research you are looking for exists. It may not have been published but more likely it is available is places to which you do not have easy access. The problem I see for you if you should find the data is in how to do a critical analysis. You will need to take the numbers and crunch them yourself in order to get a clear picture. Personally I think all that has been done already. As you concur, smoking isn't going to improve or even maintain good health. What else do you need to know?

[Kellemora]

No, not looking for a reason to smoke. Those of us who do smoke are addicted to smoking, much in the same way Coffee Drinkers are Addicted to their Speed Drug habit.
Smoking actually has two major addictions, that of nicotine, and that of habit.
We already know that tobacco smoke itself has over 2000 recognized chemicals in it.
But only a small handful of those are considered pollutants, and even less as possibly harmful.
Of particular interest, if you took a sample of the air in your home, it too has over 1000 recognized chemicals in it, and several of those are also considered pollutants.
Burning a single styrene candle in your home, styrene is the normal type of candles you buy for emergency use.
Scented, colored, and dipped candles produce even more pollutants than styrene candles.
Measuring the air quality of home that burned a single candle for four hours, it reads more pollutants than smoking a whole carton of cigarettes in that same home, or test area set aside for the purpose.
Somewhere around here I also have similar results for brewing a six cup batch of coffee. If I recall it was not as bad as burning candles, but very close to cigarettes in quantity of pollutants, but they are different pollutants.
The real wowzer was, if you roast coffee beans in your oven, without a vent to outside, the pollutants are nearly double that of cigarette smoke. But most people don't roast their own coffee beans, but many do burn candles, and often more than one candle.
Another interesting note: Burning a candle in a room of smokers, although the candle itself is a major pollutant, it burns up the more hazardous pollutants from cigarette smoke, this is especially true in a controlled environment without interfering drafts.
I will close by saying, even with all the smoking bans, the rates of cancer has still soared, the mortality tables although have increased, the increase is from better medicines and medical care. Smokers destined to live a long lifespan are still doing so, many into their hundreds or close to it.
Only because I have COPD and Emphysema, I have followed closely the number of non-smokers, vs the number of smokers who contract either one or both of the above. Naturally they always blame the diseases on smoking. And use it with non-smokers to say it was second-hand smoke.
I've only seen a minor change in cases of Emphysema since the 1960's vs the 2014's.
COPD was not a recognized disease attributed to smoking until around the 1990's, so no older data exists.
What you don't find much of is TB after the 1970's. At one time TB was blamed on smoking, until they learned better.

Although I smoke, I was actually quite healthy until I moved south and built my new air-tight office.
I honestly believe that is what caused me to contract the diseases.
I know all that smoke in this office ruined nearly everything in here, including my electronics.
But after I installed the vent, and the ashtray that directs smoke to outside, no more problems with the walls, furniture, or equipment in here getting smoke damage. So perhaps there is something to that second hand smoke concern?
But you do have to ask yourself. Why do some heavy smokers live well beyond their life expectancy, and some even become centenarians? Why didn't it kill them, or even give them the normal diseases attributed to smoking?

I personally think it has to do with everything else people have problems with.
Some have asthma, some are allergic to peanuts, in fact many are now allergic to peanuts and other tree nuts too.
In fact, peanut allergies have become so common, peanut butter is no longer allowed in schools.
I guess they will blame that on second hand smoke too!