I'm seeing quite a few websites suggesting cayenne pepper to keep Virginia Opossums out of your plants. I've never tried it myself, but that's a marsupial that appears to not like spicy food. The only species coming up in these increasingly useless search engine results as liking spicy food is Chinese tree shrews.
I'm getting so frustrated anymore trying to use google, bing, brave search, startpage, etc for finding anything except reddit or quora answers and business pages. If you find any more info on marsupials and peppers, I'd love to see it. It's a super interesting question.
I'd add hemlock in there in too. Both are plants you'll see in parks in town. A toddler died here a few years ago because his parent allowed him to play in the big plants with the pretty white flowers. They don't look dangerous and don't have to be eaten to be deadly. Breathing too much pollen is enough, especially for a child.
I'm pretty confident with berries as I've got plenty of experience, but I don't mess with wild carrot or even elderberry as I don't feel I have the knowledge at this point to make it worth the risk. There are just too many lookalikes.
They're common in landscaping throughout the US. We had some in our front yard, but us kids knew better than to eat random berries. It's painful for me to think that there are people out there without the common sense not to eat random plants they don't recognize.
Folks visiting the desert and distractedly running straight into octillos is just good entertainment. There's not much on the east coast that prepares you for a random shrub to be so hostile. Poisonous berries though, they're everywhere. I'm surprised your fellows made it to adulthood without basic suburban survival skills.
Except for grass and most trees, suburban foliage is often quite toxic. A lot of your ornamental plants are poisonous. Think lilies, foxglove, Solomon's seal, and all the excitement of morning glories. The basic understanding that you don't eat anything you can't identify as edible is important in the suburbs too.
I don't disagree, but I'd say there's not really a big problem with people or kids trying to eat flowers. Foxglove and solomon's seal are dangerous but they also don't grow where I'm at. Lilies and morning glory do grow here, and they are also not terribly dangerous to humans (without eating a lot of them.)
Where I'm at, particularly in the suburbs, there's a distinct lack of things that are tempting to eat (like a berry) and also poisonous.
So yesterday was a windchill of -5F or something equally miserable. I spent about 20 minutes out in it and then drove home. When I got into the car, the heat felt perfect on full blast as I shivered and thawed. About 15 minutes into my 30 minute drive, my body temperature caught up and I had to turn the heat down to low as I was getting too warm.
A couple months from now, I'll have the same situation, except it will be 95 F outside after a long, hot work day and I'll jack the AC up to get down to a comfortable body temperature. Once I cool off, the AC on full blast will be way too cold to tolerate.
Thankfully, I've got an 8-year-old base model car that allows me to do all that with physical dials that don't take my attention off the road. I can't imagine what it would take to program an "auto" mode that knows how long it takes for my body to reach a comfortable temperature after being out in the elements. I think I'd lose my mind if my car just blithely set itself to 70 degrees and assumed that would work for me. That may be an option for office workers in milder climates, but they're not the only ones buying cars.
A lot of these solutions that people are mentioning, or the types of cars with climate controls they like, seem to be posting from places like San Diego or the California Bay area as opposed to places like, you know, the Midwest or the South or the Pacific Northwest or, you know, New England.
The distance from my home to a mountain lion has been documented at under a mile in the last year. They are officially spotted within a few miles every couple years, but I'm quite confident they're almost always there and just usually better at hiding. I would not consider my location in the middle of suburban sprawl to be anything like wilderness. I'd say you're looking at a 6 hour trip minimum from my location to anything anyone could argue as being wilderness.
If we're going as simple as time to a wild animal, we've had fox in the front yard and I see turkey and deer within a couple of blocks of my place often enough that I wonder if they don't sometimes order at the fast food drive thrus on either end of the neighborhood. I live as far from a cornfield as I ever have right now and that doesn't seem to phase the wildlife.
Back to the article though, they seem to be measuring the distance from town to rural surroundings. At no point do they mention wilderness, rugged landscape, or any kind of danger from the environment. They're measuring to the nearest bit of pasture. Things that can eat you don't factor into it.
In the other 127 schools, what percentage of students were proficient in math? How about other schools given the same test? It's hard to draw conclusions without context as to what an average or above average school scores in these tests.
If you've never done it, deep fried whole potatoes are amazing. It gets creamy in a way that good mashed potatoes do. Just be careful as they can explode like anything else with a lot of water. You want to poke holes in it so the steam can escape.
I will not allow myself to purchase a deep fat fryer because it's not healthy to live exclusively off of fried potatoes and associated toppings.
>Welds are quite strong -- it just extends the metal. This is especially true when the baseline quality of the metal is not high.
This is not the case at all. A weld almost always weakens the base material. And you don't just use whatever steel is the cheapest to build a ship. You use what is appropriate to the use case. There are cheaper and more expensive options within that category, but you make it sound like you can just grab whatever is cheapest in the yard that day.
There's so much that goes into material selection and handling that this comment confidently hand waves away.
Welds weakening the base metal is a myth that is disproven literally day 1 of any welding course. There are metals that don't like the heating and will weaken, but if the weld breaks before the base metal, someone fucked up real bad.
Of course shit welding can cause weakening of the material but thats true of everything. Anything that is worth welding that also is important will use metals that have strong welding properties that make the weld stronger than the base material.
This is misleading or wrong. In general, the weakest part of a steel weld is the heat-affected zone. Not the rest of the base metal. Not the weld.
The heat-affected zone is caused by the weld. Ergo, welds to weaken the base metal.
In most cases, this also doesn't matter. I think all but one of the things I've welded, even a bad weld would have been way more than strong enough, and for many, even the tack weld would have held fine. Welds are very, very strong, and it's usually cheap and easy to use sufficiently strong materials that all of this is moot.
But for something like an ultralight bike frame, racing car, or airplane, it is something you do need to worry about.
I'm getting so frustrated anymore trying to use google, bing, brave search, startpage, etc for finding anything except reddit or quora answers and business pages. If you find any more info on marsupials and peppers, I'd love to see it. It's a super interesting question.