I don’t like to go outside on the really smoky days and today is one of those really smoky days. Here’s the AirNow monitor:

So it got me to thinking, how much air do we breathe every day?

I took a number from HowStuffWorks to get an estimate. They use 11,000 Liters per person per day. The American Lung Association says 2,000 gallons per person per day. That converts to 7571 Liters. I expect there will be a lot of variation in this estimate.

I found I could easily mostly fill a 4-gallon trash bag exhaling normally in one minute. The bag was not at capacity as I had my hand holding a twist in the top few inches, so I estimated the amount with a little geometry. The full part of the bag was a weird, pointy, oblong shape, so I imagined it as a right circular cylinder. I set 12 inches as the average height, 4 inches as the average radius, and used the formula Area = πr²h and got 603 cubic inches. A gallon is 231 cubic inches, so that’s about 2.6 gallons.

If I breathe air at a rate of 2.6 gallons per minute that’s 156 gallons per hour or 3744 gallons per day. That’s over 14,000 Liters. I guess I’m a “heavy breather”!

I don’t think much of my estimate, but I note that it aligns with the other estimates so I will assume their estimates are reasonable. I suspect I would breathe at about half the rate when I sleep, so my 14,000 Liters would then be closer to 10,000 Liters.

So how big is 10,000 Liters? Is 2600 gallons easier to visualize? How about 350 cubic feet?

The cube root of 350 is about seven (7 x 7 x 7 = 343). Imagine a box 7 feet on a side: height, length, and width all about seven feet. That’s how much air you need every day.

Another way to imagine it is in cubic yards, which is about thirteen. Our local garden supply outfit can deliver 10 cubic yards of rock in one load with their ten-wheeler dump truck. Those concrete mixers you see hold about 8 cubic yards.

So if you want to know how much air you need each day, it is at least one truckload!

The smoke has kept me inside. I did go for a walk on Tuesday and regretted it—I should have worn an N95 mask. My throat was scratchy and dry for some time afterwards. Pollution from wildland fires is nasty! And the worst part of it is that the visible stuff, the ash and smoke, are not the main issue. The issue is the very small stuff, the little bits 2.5 microns and smaller. A single cell of E. coli is about 3 microns in size so these particulates are not visible to the human eye. (A micron is a micro-meter or 10^-6 meter, about 0.00004 inches.)

One thing I did see on my walk was Madia elegans, also know as Common Madia, Spring Madia, or Tarweed. Here’s a photo:

Madia is regularly seen along roadsides, in uncultivated fields, and in disturbed areas. It is native to California and the West and a similar alien species Madia sativa, is found on the coasts. The flowers open up in the mornings and face the sun and then curl up in the heat of the afternoon and at night. Around here they bloom for most of the summer and as you can see they linger into autumn.

I’m not much of a photographer but here’s another shot:

Madias are known as tarweeds because of the pungent oils that make the stems and leaves sticky. The seeds were harvested by Native Americans for food.

As you can see it is a sunflower, or composite flower, known botanically as a member of the family Asteraceae.

Cigarette smoke contains “tars” as well as nicotine and these contribute to the health impacts on smokers’ lungs. I guess as I was wheezing around the block I was thinking it was like being in a room full of smokers!

I took this from the EPA site AirNow.

It doesn’t require a sensor to know the air is bad. And it is very bad here in Yreka.

I know we are lucky—so far—as people in nearby communities have lost their homes because of the fires.

We are at the mercy of the winds. In the old days they had Aeolus, the divine keeper of the Anemoi, or Winds. Some Winds were benign, but the Storm-Winds wreaked havoc upon land and sea, so it was up to Aeolus to keep them bottled up. This he did, mostly, but if Zeus ordered them cut loose, so be it.

These days we have windy.com with its entrancing animations. (Warning: serious time sink!) We don’t make sacrifices to the gods the same way, either. Instead of slaughtering a beast and burning offerings on a pyre we build super-computer forecasting ensembles that churn through powerful algorithms. This takes a lot of energy. Not just the human physical and mental energy, but the enormous amount of electrical energy devoted to these tasks.

And important tasks they are!

In geology, aeolian processes are ones involving the erosion, transport, and deposition of sediments by the wind. Winds don’t just affect our weather but also our landscape.

Particulate material from wildland fires can travel across the globe. While we are trying not to breathe in the smoke and ash from our nearby fires, long-traveled micro-debris from fires in other places comes our way as well.

I root for a fresh, cleansing breeze to scour out the valleys and let us breathe again. But I know that firefighters are also at the mercy of the winds, and the best-laid firefighting plans could be scuttled by abrupt changes in wind direction and speed. So, I hope for the best instead.

We all want it to cool down and we all want the rains to come, but it is only September and we have some weeks to go yet.

Stay safe out there!

Here’s a graph. It’s like a lot of other graphs that have to do with natural resources in that it is “going up.” We need a lot of natural resources to live our 21st century lives.

The graphs shows the production and consumption of aluminum, which is expected to reach 65 million tonnes annually. (The graph is in kilo-tonnes, so the 60,000 kilo-tonnes above is the same as 60 million tonnes.) A tonne is a thousand kilograms or about 2200 pounds, so 65 million tonnes is 1.433 x 10¹¹ pounds or 140,330,000,000 (140 billion) pounds. That’s twenty pounds for each person on the planet.

The graph comes from the website of Rusal (Russia Aluminium), the second-largest aluminum producer in the world. (They still call it “aluminium” over there.) It’s the largest company outside of China which dominates the global aluminum market, both producing and consuming more than any other country.

Aluminum is the most abundant metal in the earth’s crust. It is a very reactive metal and is bound up tightly in the rocks. It is hard to separate as a pure metal and the processes require enormous amounts of electricity.

But our lives depend on aluminum. These days we make just about everything out of the stuff.

What’s weird about aluminum is that is has no biological function. Our bodies need lots of metals like iron and calcium. Zinc, copper, cobalt, magnesium—all are found in living systems. Not aluminum. It isn’t particularly toxic to us either as we tend to pass it out readily via our urine and feces. You can cook with aluminum and store food in it, it won’t cause Alzheimer’s or anything like that.

Most of the aluminum in the world is used to build lighter ships, planes, cars, and other transport vehicles. Aluminum is strong for its weight and modern alloys are nearly corrosion-proof. Only steel is used more.

We don’t need aluminum to be alive. But we certainly need it to live.

Perusing Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching I came across a section about how to make a caltrop. A caltrop is an ancient weapon. The Romans called it a tribulus. It looks like this:

Four metal spikes (or two twisted together) in a tetrahedron shape means no matter how you toss it on the ground at least one spike is sticking upwards. Obviously they are for disabling men, animals, or rubber-tired vehicles. Strewn across a road, trail, or pathway they can make life mighty painful or at least terribly inconvenient.

There’s a common plant called caltrop, better known to locals as “puncture vine.” The botanical name is Tribulus terrestris. The fruits of this persistent, ground-hugging, noxious weed are spiky and harden into bicycle tire-hunting demons. They are often called “goatheads.” Anyone who rides a mountain bike can tell you about goatheads. I upgraded to extra-beefy tires and tubes on my bike after too many flats from those things.

The nuisance impact of puncture vine is so great that weevils have been imported and released in order to help control it. The plant originates in southern Europe and the weevils are imported from France as well as India. They lay eggs on the stems and seed pods and the larvae emerge and eat and weaken or kill the plant.

Here’s a picture:

You’ve seen this plant on every roadside!

Here’s what it looks like when the goatheads have launched their assault on your tires:

A weed is a plant you don’t want. Most folks consider Tribulus terrestris to be a weed. Farmers and ranchers know it to be a serious agricultural pest. But some folks are interested in caltrop for its medicinal value.

Yes, the lowly puncture vine, it seems, is an aphrodisiac. The leaves and roots have many (supposed) health benefits. Do a search using the botanical name and you’ll find plenty of stuff about it. I’ve taken herbal supplements that had “alfalfa” as an ingredient. It’s a crazy world out there in supplement-land, you never know what you are getting! So if the herbal way is your thing check out caltrop. Me, I’ll avoid ’em.

p.s. I’m not an eco-warrior or anything like that, I just like reading weird stuff. (That’s my disclaimer if the FBI is reading my blog.)