FB? What a joke. DARPA and NIH are both in line way, way ahead of FB and I doubt that they've got it yet either.

Only if you significantly increase the size of your roof. A typical home requires 30 KwH of energy/day (average is 867, but for anybody that can afford a Tesla roof at all or live someplace where you need air conditioning, you probably need twice that or more). The Tesla cars get ballpark 3 miles per STORED KwH. A typical car adds roughly 1000 miles/month or 120000 miles per year (YMM literally V) so call it 30 miles/day or 10 KWH/day, which is a third of a typical house, a smaller fraction of a rich person's big air conditioned house. Multiply that 10 KWH/day by around 1.4 and call it 14 KWH/day allowing for inefficiencies.

Basically, if you want to run your electric car with energy from your solar room, plan to make your roof at least half again as large as needed for "just" your house. Since Tesla roofs (in particular) are crazy expensive relative to the cost of an ordinary solar roof, just as most Tesla models are crazy expensive compared to the cost of an ordinary hybrid car, this is going to continue to be a toy for rich people that if anything will be resented by all of the people that could live for a year on what the Telsa OR the roof cost and wish they owned a house to put it on or in.

You're right. It isn't a high school project. It is a suitable project for a second year student majoring in CPS or a first year student who taught him/her self to program in high school. The most difficult part of a calculator isn't writing a calculator -- one could hack that out in short order in almost any language capable of parsing the command line and writing a single loop with a switch inside -- perl, C, python, fortran, java -- a compiler if you want to make it a standalone program, an interpreter if you want quick and dirty. It's writing the GUI, if you want to make it a "calculator" that looks like an onscreen version of a pocket calculator. For that you have to master writing ANY GUI PROGRAM AT ALL first, and that's generally pretty difficult, although one could arguably still use GUI building tools to lay out the interface pretty easily, so that if/when one masters the concept of the event loop and callbacks, one could wrap the exact same switching logic into the callbacks and make it work. A simple +-/*= calculator or a simple +-/* reverse polish calculator is within the easy reach of anybody who can a) code in almost any language worth a damn; and b) (for the GUI case only) code any GUI at all in that language.

It actually sounds like fun, and if I didn't have a whole stack of things I need to do with higher priority (or if I had any use for it, given that I already have a highly functional sorta-open-source HPC 15C emulator written so it runs in a TTY fullscreen GUI OR on the command line) as well as the actual HP HPC-15C emulator that runs on my phone, I'd be tempted to tackle it myself just to prove the point.

ROTFL. Many of those "scientists" contributed to the development of linux in general and the specific packages in SL in particular, and honestly, this is a good move. It is silly to have a huge stack of derivatives of RHEL -- fedora and CENTOS are plenty. After all, the only real question is doing the necessary builds on the RPM repository in ANY distribution, and it is actually a lot simpler if you keep it close to the mainline development trees. CENTOS is perfect for those who are very conservative and who want a comparatively long lifetime for the build and don't care about getting the latest and greatest additions to the general software library for Linux in general. Good for servers, good for institutionally managed installs with relatively inexperienced sysadmins. Fedora is a better all purpose desktop, a bit more unstable (especially after a new release) and a bit more likely to leave you high and dry while problems are worked out. But "high and dry" just means that you run Fedora past its nominal expire date -- serious problems are fixed quickly either way, less serious ones more slowly. If the SL folks are going to maintain the same RPMs under CENTOS that they were maintaining under SL, who the hell cares? All of those packages were probably being rapidly ported to CENTOS and Fedora both anyway.

The one thing about "scientific" applications is that they are generally NOT dependent on bleeding edge libraries and are much LESS sensitive to the evolution of library packages. The one exception is probably high end graphics and simulations involving graphics, but there you might well WANT to hitch onto fedora instead of CENTOS, as Centos (and RHEL) are intentionally super-conservative slow and are generally way behind the evolution of high end graphics software. RHEL sells to server rooms, not high end visualization labs.

Anyway, there is such a small cost to switching from SL to Centos (or for that matter to RHEL or Fedora) that you obviously have no idea what you are talking about. They are all RPM based, they are all based on more or less the same core of admin software, they all use Yum/DNF -- it is really more about putting together the package list you want to install on your clients when next you upgrade than the particular distro you install in this closely linked family.

... if you read TFA is that the rice grows much faster and produces a lot more in the same amount of time, but because they didn't increase the available soil nutrients to match, they are basically diluting its nutritional value relative to total yield. Which is silly. All they have to do to avoid the problem is provide the plants with balanced fertilization instead of bumping one major component of healthy growth without bumping others.

This is about as useful as reporting that rice grown with too much nitrogen relative to other nutrients may grow faster but not be as nutritious or healthy as rice grown with a better balance of fertilizers. Or with the right/wrong amount of water.

The PROBLEM in other words is that the rice grew TOO WELL for a fertilizer level set for poorer growth.

Look, it's all useful information until it is turned into propaganda. A huge fraction of fruits and vegetables are grown all over the world in actual greenhouses, and standard practice in greenhouse farms is to bump CO2 to as high as 1000 ppm because IF you balance the increased CO2 fertilization against water and other nutrients, you get much larger yields, faster, from healthier plants. C3 respiring plants all over the world are growing roughly 15% faster and with larger yields than they did 150 years ago, but if you took that 15% away arguing that food crops must have been better for us without the extra CO2 you'd literally starve a billion people. This simple fact has been carefully ignored in most of the public discussions of Demon CO2, so now it is necessary to "prove" that increased CO2 is bad for plants. But it's not. Quite the contrary. With well-known, long since published federal guidelines from the Department of Agriculture. It's one of the many things that confounds the "dendroclimatologists" who claim to be able to read off global warming and past temperatures by examining tree rings. I read a study of tree growth (in general) in Europe and the increase in the growth rate and health of European forests over the last fifty or so years has been remarkable. There is an ongoing process of "antidesertification" -- deserts starting to green up again -- as a direct consequence of increased CO2. Finally, CO2 levels in the last ice age dropped to within 10 or 20 ppm of the "critical point" that would cause mass extinction of whole classes of respiring plants due to inadequate partial pressure to drive diffusion into the plants at a rate capable of sustaining life and growth.

At this point there isn't a lot of reason to think we'll ever reach 580 ppm. Fusion actually looks like it is LIKELY to come home in the next decade, if not the next three years, and photovoltaics and batteries appear to have passed a critical point of their own and become at least break even if not win a bit as the cheapest source of new electrical power. Within the decade, we'll see more and more homes being built that are 80% or better self-sufficient in energy. And hey, one day it's not inconceivable that people will stop knee jerk opposing fission based power, and maybe LFTR or some other comparatively safe technology will take off to power the US for a thousand years or so.

Power companies in general are public utilities. They cannot charge "whatever they like" for rates, because they are granted de facto monopolies in particular regions, and while it isn't COMPLETELY impossible to change utilities serving a given area, it is rare, difficult, and expensive as a general rule. So this is in no sense whatsoever a "free market".

If you are allow to add a fixed margin onto costs as your "profit" for selling electrical power, you literally cannot increase the profits of your company in any semi-saturated market with roughly fixed costs for things like fuel and maintenance. Anything that raises the cost of generating the cost of the electricity you sell, however, increases your marginal profit at a fixed margin. If you are allow to keep 10% over costs at retail, and you double costs, you actually double your profits at a fixed marginal profit.

To put it bluntly, the group that has made out like a bandit throughout the entire discussion is the very energy industry that is demonized by AGW. Not only do they get to raise prices at a fixed margin, they get tax writeoffs, they get free advertising, and if you look, they get a huge share of R&D money in the "search" for renewable alternative fuels and so on. You can see the same thing happening in the fossil fuel industry -- there is little real shortage evident in the marketplace, but it is hopefully fairly obvious that global power politics is largely concerned these days with increasing price-raising panic, even transiently, to bump local profits for the fuel industries. Iran? Well, it COULD be about nuclear arms in Iran's hands, but it is also about oil. The Syrian civil war and ISIS in general? Well it COULD be about religion, or the thirst of a people for freedom -- or it could be about oil and gas pipelines to Europe. The first, and second Iraqi war? It might be all about freedom and oppression, a large bully trying to take over an innocent smaller country -- or it could be all about oil, and just who is going to control its flow and price. A truly cynical person might attribute Venezuela to global politics manipulating the oil market.

The statement that there are few industries benefit from "AGW" isn't the point. There are lots of industries out there that make far more money because of the AGW panic than they would ever have made without it. There have been whole wars fought over only a comparatively small part of the total energy industry. We're talking over a trillion dollars a year, globally. It is naive in the extreme to think that with that kind of money on the table that the entire political and scientific discussion is free from massive corruption, any more than global pharm is with far less money on the table.

Well said. And anyone who takes issue with it has only to look at almost 60 years worth of papers that "proved" that fat in our diets was causing heart disease and high cholesterol, a "fact" that just happened to make major industries in the US that are huge political donors lots of money. Or any number of other scientific claims that were sufficiently entrenched that it took at least years, maybe decades, for science to self-correct, even without a trillion dollars a year or so at stake.

It's not that AGW is "false" -- there is good support for some warming of the surface from increased CO2, in straight up physics, around 1 C per doubling of CO2, all things being equal. The trouble is that they aren't equal. The Earth's climate is a chaotic process, and it is pretty reasonable to doubt the predictive models attempting to integrate the Navier-Stokes double-coupled system on a spinning, tilted oblate spheroid covered irregularly with continents and oceans and mountains and warmed in a complex way in its evolving elliptical orbit by a somewhat variable star as far as "predictions" of things like water vapor feedback and changes in the global conveyor belt carrying oceanic heat around and atmospheric flow patterns, especially when the models are started with "arbitrary" initial conditions (since nobody has any idea what the actual state of the atmosphere and ocean is at anything like the granularity of the models, which is still 30 orders of magnitude greater than the Kolmogorov scale), run to produce a spectrum of possible futures, averaged and then superaveraged without regard to weighting, and then turned into a "prediction" that is supposed to carry more political weight then the lives and fortunes of all of those affected by the enormously expensive measures taken to ameliorate a future "catastrophe" that nobody can actually quite measure as being truly catastrophic.

There are also inconvenient facts that are quietly ignored during the public debate by supporters of AGW as a "catastrophe". One is that roughly 1/7th of the Earth's population is eating today thanks to the roughly 15% increase in growth rate of C3 respiring plants due to the increase in CO2 in Earth's CO2-starved atmosphere (the minimum CO2 during the coldest part of the Wisconsin glaciation dropped to just over the partial pressure required to prevent mass extinction of whole classes of respiring plants). That the Earth was coming out of the little Ice Age about the time we started really burning things for energy and gradually ramping up CO2, and that while too hot isn't great, too cold is TRULY a disaster for the breadbasket temperate zone for the planet, and isn't particularly good for the ecology, either, and is often accompanied by massive global droughts.

The point is that the climate is changing, and has always been changing. The notion that the Earth's climate is in any sense whatsoever a stationary process is a myth, a myth caused by the comparatively short "memory" of living humans compared to the timescales of change. The Earth is large enough that there are always climate/weather extremes happening somewhere on the surface, and if you look for them and report them as "news", you cannot avoid conveying the impression of disastrous change. It requires careful statistical analysis to detect anything like real change, and even then the statistics provides no reliable means of attributing cause, not in a chaotic model that has huge natural fluctuations year to year, month to month, week to week. It's a cherrypicker's paradise, an open invitation for confirmation bias to run amok, without the slightest possibility of a double blind experiment or observation that isn't multiply confounded by impossibly complex dynamics.

This is a case where in the long run, the entire debate likely will not matter. As solar technology continues to improve and become cheaper (including storage options and more efficient, cheaper cells) pure economics is going to drive a gradual abandonment of burning increasingly scarce fuel for energy. If fusion energy finally really is "around the corner" -- potentially within the next three years -- it will make the trillion or so dollars spent on panic so far truly the world's cruelest joke ever. And there is a resurgent chance that long before global warming becomes a "catastrophic" issue, we will have wiped out 2/3 of the human species with global thermonuclear war, which is a REAL ecological catastrophe in the making. And yes, eventually science will prevail (as computers get powerful enough to actually attack the problem, maybe, although it is a damn hard problem, not science "beyond all doubt" but science that it is difficult to take terribly seriously -- so far -- and eventually maybe possibly we'll have instrumentation that is good enough to make reliable global measurements. Right now our knowledge of past temperatures and temperature changes on a global basis is horribly exaggerated -- nobody rational could possibly believe the claimed precision of our knowledge of temperatures 100-200 years ago, for example -- and we have too short a baseline with decent instrumentation (like satellites!) to be able to arrive at many conclusions about global climate, although our observations of weather are getting pretty good.

Or, we could look at what the data say -- there's rather a lot of it. General conclusion: Coffee is more likely to be very slightly, almost invisibly good for you in terms of overall cancer risk, known to reduce the risk for several major cancers and without any solid evidence of increased risk in any (although there are some mixed results). Bearing in mind that coffee can also be decaffeinated with organic solvents and that the studies involved in this large review probably have confounding factors that are variably controlled between studies, this isn't surprising.

I could also post sundry papers that more or less universally suggest that coffee is good for people with metabolic syndrome or T2D, positively affecting their metabolism. My wife is a physician, and every time I've suggested that lots of coffee (she drinks a bit over half a pot a day) might be risky she deluges me with objective evidence that not only is it not overall risky, it is overall beneficial.

But who cares about objective evidence? The current warning is WORSE than hearsay, anecdotal evidence. It is as damning as saying that if you masturbate you MIGHT go blind as a result. Who can even argue with that?

Coffee and cancer risk: a summary overview.
Alicandro G1, Tavani A, La Vecchia C.
Author information
Abstract

We reviewed available evidence on coffee drinking and the risk of all cancers and selected cancers updated to May 2016. Coffee consumption is not associated with overall cancer risk. A meta-analysis reported a pooled relative risk (RR) for an increment of 1cup of coffee/day of 1.00 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.99-1.01] for all cancers. Coffee drinking is associated with a reduced risk of liver cancer. A meta-analysis of cohort studies found an RR for an increment of consumption of 1cup/day of 0.85 (95% CI: 0.81-0.90) for liver cancer and a favorable effect on liver enzymes and cirrhosis. Another meta-analysis showed an inverse relation for endometrial cancer risk, with an RR of 0.92 (95% CI: 0.88-0.96) for an increment of 1cup/day. A possible decreased risk was found in some studies for oral/pharyngeal cancer and for advanced prostate cancer. Although data are mixed, overall, there seems to be some favorable effect of coffee drinking on colorectal cancer in case-control studies, in the absence of a consistent relation in cohort studies. For bladder cancer, the results are not consistent; however, any possible direct association is not dose and duration related, and might depend on a residual confounding effect of smoking. A few studies suggest an increased risk of childhood leukemia after maternal coffee drinking during pregnancy, but data are limited and inconsistent. Although the results of studies are mixed, the overall evidence suggests no association of coffee intake with cancers of the stomach, pancreas, lung, breast, ovary, and prostate overall. Data are limited, with RR close to unity for other neoplasms, including those of the esophagus, small intestine, gallbladder and biliary tract, skin, kidney, brain, thyroid, as well as for soft tissue sarcoma and lymphohematopoietic cancer.

Yeah! What you said!

Won't do any good, though. And don't forget the time reversal -- On alpha centauri and earth, people but the red and blue marbles in their respective boxes, they zip backwards in time (with rocket fuel magically appearing in space and being sucked up into the engine to store itself unoxided the tanks) to be opened by somebody wearing a blindfold so he can't see which marble was in which box who ends up with a red and blue marble in his hand. Like that, too.

That's the part that most folks don't even think of. Measurement requires the spontaneous exchange of information and increases entropy, but entropy is in some sense an illusion in time-reversible microdynamics, and people do tend to forget that there is both an advanced and a retarded component to relativistic reversible interactions.

...or else there would be no medical journals, would there?

I hear you and agree, but I doubt very much that you'll get any traction on /. with this observation, in spite of the fact that it actually has its own wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Note that this is a crisis already in the realm of openly published research results and conclusions. There isn't any good reason to think that the numbers cited in the Nature study are going to be any smaller for studies conducted by parties with even stronger (monetary or sociopolitical) vested interests, who don't even expose their results to the greater scientific community for checking and replication. And the numbers are terrible.

Look, it is only six or seven years now that we finally learned that dietary cholesterol and fat are almost completely irrelevant to heart disease, after being told nothing but the opposite for some fifty years, all of it stamped with "proven by real science":

https://academic.oup.com/advan...

Now imagine that a Dietary Protection Agency (DPA) had been created to deal with the "public health crisis" caused by high levels of fat and cholesterol in the US diet, and that they crafted regulations banning things like the open sale of cooking fats, the production of bacon, the sale of cheese and eggs. Suppose further that the "evidence" they cited to defend these draconian measures was -- precisely what was, in fact, used to support the argument that high fat = high cholesterol -- but that this data, instead of even being available to support the epidemiological study I just cited, was hidden behind a shroud of "patient confidentiality". BLTs would be a thing of the past, the sugar and carb industry and PETA would be crowing and slipping the DPA large sums under the table to ensure that the basis for its rules was never overly scrutinized to protect the meat animals that are the primary sources of dietary cholesterol, and the public would not be well served. At least with bacon and eggs, smothered in cheese sauce.

Finally, the joker who invoked "HIPPA" above as if he knew what he was talking about -- for starters, it is HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, whose purpose was to protect people from being denied insurance (for which it proved remarkably ineffectual) or employment (slightly better) on the basis of prior health history -- clearly missed the point that all published medical research is HIPAA compliant. HIPAA compliance isn't that difficult to arrange or manage in a study, and publishing methodology and results from such studies is the basis for every single published work in the field of evidence-based medicine, and even with open publication, there is a ton of non-reproducible crap that makes it out into the wild (like the cholesterol gaff, like the sugar/carb gaff) and stays there for years or even decades before independent work finally corrects it. No sane physician is going to base treatments on results from completely hidden work -- no methods, no data, just somebody saying "trust us, we've seen the methods and data and we totally believe them". That's not science, and it isn't evidence-based reasoning, it is just a glaring opportunity for confirmation bias, political bias, social bias, or plain old money to influence what should be an open process that makes mistakes all the time as it is, even when fully open.

To conclude, I honestly think the EPA doesn't get a bye on the open participation in Real Science, which involves things like peer review, reproducibility, double blind placebo controlled studies as opposed to stupid epidemiological correlations with unknown confounding variables, the open analysis of the statistical basis of claims, avoidance of data dredging, cherrypicking, and all of the other myriad aspects of Bad Science, science we don't get to see and criticize. I am quite certain that it is entirely possible to "sanitize" any results that are used as the basis of decision making in such a way that they are HIPAA compliant, just as every paper in (say) the New England Journal of Medicine is so sanitized. And I don't buy the argument that "proprietary" data (whatever that is) should be used as a basis of public policy without being exposed to the same scrutiny that ordinary research data and methodology is exposed to. If it isn't, it's simply not science.

The entire point of scientific beliefs is that you should never have to believe them because someone says "trust me, it is true"! That's the realm of religion and politics. Maybe you're smart enough to understand their basis, maybe not, but if you care to you too can at the very least see the entire transparent chain of evidence and reasoning that leads people to current best belief -- which can still be mistaken and often enough is -- without ever having to really "trust" somebody in the sense of having them tell you ABOUT something in a way that won't let you see for yourself.

I mean, how can one argue with a post like that? I "could" receive my gold-plated potty, towed by my pony, in the next twenty minutes. The oceans "could" boil from global warming, turning the Earth into a Venus-a-like. The Higgs boson "could" have reached a state somewhere in the Universe just out of sight where particles lose their mass and the wave of Universal extinction "could" be rolling towards us to end the Universe (in the vicinity of the Earth) long before we lose all the large land animals.

Heck, we can do better than that. We can find data from pretty much any time and place, addressing any subject. We can find a trend in it (almost all data has SOME trend). We can draw an interpolating line through the trend -- linear, polynomial, whatever. Then we can use that line to extrapolate the trend and claim that whatever it predicts COULD happen.

Damn! You're right! It could!

News at 11! My grandson Jacob could reach ten meters in height in fifty years! Hey, I'm just extrapolating a trend, here...

It's called "Hunan hands" in the culinary world (probably among other things). The first time I made hot pepper jelly out of good old cayennes I found out the hard way that you should either wear gloves or QUICKLY wash your hands before the juices penetrate your skin.

The one time I bought ghost pepper sauce a few drops -- drops -- rendered a dish I was trying it in inedible. By anyone except macho types trying to prove that they can love pain. I simply disposed of the bottle and will never go that way again. Peppers should bring flavor with the heat. One can always add heat along with the flavor as there is a wide spectrum to choose from -- high quality paprika for the pepper taste without much heat, cayenne powder for a very similar taste WITH some heat, habeneros (already ALMOST too hot to be useful) and habenero sauces if you want flavor and a lot of heat. "Heat" by itself is a silly thing to add to a dish as it serves no real purpose; heat as a part of natural flavor in a regional cuisine is another thing entirely.

I cook with peppers very hot or not a lot (sorry:-). Usually I touch the first cut to my tongue when I seed and slice them to assess their heat, and if they are so hot that the single touch makes me sorry, I work fast and wash my hands immediately to get the oils and neurotoxins off. Haven't had hunan hands since that one original episode, although I do keep surgical gloves around for the VERY rare cases (like making hot pepper jelly) where I'm going to be seeding and chopping peppers for more than ten minutes, which seems to be around the time needed for the heat to start to get through and into the skin if they aren't washed.

Yeah, or what you get owning a dog or cat. Which I do. I laugh at your silly blowing air and its bathroom flora -- do I hold my breath while I'm in the bathroom? Of course not. Do I not pet my dog in spite of the fact that my dog has far more bacteria on it than are being discussed in this article? No, I pet my dog, I snuggle with my dog, my dog licks my very face. Do I grade papers that have been handled by literally hundreds of students while eating a doughnut (and not washing my hands after every paper)? I do. Do I eat the doughnut even if it falls on the floor, according to the five, or even the ten second rule (brushing off any actual dog hair that might adhere)? I have been known to.

Do I get sick all the time? No, I hardly ever get sick -- I've got great, and well maintained, HERD IMMUNITY!

I'm not worried about bacteria, or dirt, from normal sources. The things that will get you are that salmonella-laced cow manure you are handling while you garden. The flu virus you contract just breathing as you walk past somebody that is shedding the virus with every breath. That raw oyster that just happened to harbor vibrio. The plate served to you by a waiter with hepatitis. Some diseases are virulent and readily transmitted, and the air of a bathroom is way, way down the list. In actual fact, I'm at more risk of stuff like norovirus FROM the fact that no, I don't wash my hands after touching every paper a student ever hands me, and I touch my pens, and I loan them pens, and I sit at the front of a classroom filled with all of those disease vectors right after they return from spring break laden with new bacteria I do NOT have herd immunity to -- yet -- and breathe, while they are all coughing and sneezing over themselves and each other. Two weeks later, we all have herd immunity again and things quiet down.

Yeah, what you said. Tidal volume of human lungs (the amount we actually breath in and out per breath) is a bit over 0.5 liters. We breathe 12-20 times per minute, say 16. Thus we breathe in roughly 8 liters of air per minute just being inside a bathroom. A typical bathroom stay is (very roughly) 2 minutes or so if you are only urinating and are male, 4 or 5 minutes if you are urinating and are female (based on observations, not experience), and if you defecate anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes or even longer. Hence just using a bathroom for any purpose has you moving 16 to 120 liters of bathroom air through your lungs. When you smell bad smells in a bathroom, your olfactory system is literally reacting to microparticles of toilet water, urine, and feces in the air that are in the very ACT of being deposited on soft, wet, warm tissue.

One reason we have an evolved aversion to certain smells is that yes, just the act of breathing can nucleate you with bad bacteria or viruses, although our noses and sinuses are also evolved to at least try to protect us by trapping bad stuff before it reaches the lungs per se and flush it via nose drip either down to where it is swallowed (the stomach is a pretty good sanitizer for non-intestinal bacteria with a pH around 1) or blown or dripped out the nose itself. That runny nose you hate is your body trying to protect you from stuff riding along with the pollen and dust mites and human ejecta you are breathing all the time, although (of course) some bacteria and viruses make their living riding along with precisely that drip. It's a war between the collection of cells that somehow becomes "you" and every other cell or replicating molecule or oxidative/toxic molecule in the Universe, and life is one long holding action in the war.

Our immune systems do, in fact, get stronger with use. My wife is a physician -- she sees sick people, sometimes very sick people, almost every day. Sure, she practices hygiene to the point where the VA hospital where she works had a hard time fingerprinting her when she started there -- doctors actually wash their hands so frequently that they wash their own fingerprints nearly off -- but there is no way to eliminate a perpetual rain of contact with sneezed, breathed, coughed bacteria and viruses. My wife almost NEVER gets sick. She has the metaphorical immune system of a rhinoceros, kept strong by constant, daily use.

The truth is that we all tend to develop herd immunity to the bacteria and many of the viruses that are local to our community. E coli is at the same time bad, but also a normal resident of the human gut. Your family and probably most of your friends and co-workers have more or less the same strains of "tolerated" enterococcus. Your gut contains lots of other "pathogenic" bacteria -- notably streptococcus. A nice figure is here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Your stool IS almost entirely bacteria. The problems arise when you hit doses of e coli from DIFFERENT human herds, or different species. If you travel to mexico, or india, you are likely enough to get "Delhi Belly" -- a nasty infection arising from your body meeting perfectly normal bacteria from a DIFFERENT herd. Amazingly, people travelling from India to the US for the first time are not that unlikely to have the exact same thing happen to them even though our water supply is for the most part pretty clean and reasonably sterile, because you can't avoid being exposed to the principle herd bacteria of the place you live. You'll breathe them in in any public restroom, make contact with them on every doorknob, every dollar bill, every restaurant table, every human hand you shake, every breath you breathe in a public space where people are talking, laughing, coughing, sneezing.

The entire article misses this point. The more you protect yourself from your environment, the more difficult it is to develop and maintain the critical herd immunity that KEEPS you from getting really sick. The article presents no evidence whatsoever that people who use restrooms with paper towels get sick more or less often than people who use restrooms equipped with blowers. In most cases, I'd wager that the disease rates are so close that they could NEVER be resolved -- after all, you breathed in literally billions of the bacteria while you were IN the restroom, your reasonably clean, dry hands are not a terribly productive environment for bacterial growth, and most of the bacteria you are being exposed to you already have in your own gut and you have herd immunity to them. Exceptions might well be airport restrooms, where the herds of the world mix, university restrooms right after the fall semester begins, when herds mix (and when in fact lots of students get sick, just like they tend to get sick right after all the breaks when they go home and return -- faculty eventually build up a lot of cross-herd immunity).

Hand washing is without a doubt a useful step in reducing the frequency of infections, but worrying about paper towels vs blowers is IMO pretty silly. There are also numerous solutions to the problem IF one thinks it really is a problem. Two that come to mind including putting a perpetually running air filter in bathrooms, complete with a UV sterilizer capable of nuking the spores as they go through. They make water bottles with this nowadays -- the technology is readily available and reasonably cheap -- and doing this in public restrooms would have the benefit of lowering the bacteria content of those 16 to 120 liters of air you're going to breathe anyway during your stay. The second way is (duh!) just putting a vent on the intakes so that they draw their air in from outside of the bathroom. Problem solved. You're back to the bacteria count of ordinary air (plus all the dust, dust mites, pollen and their associated microbiome of bacteria and fungus, sundry spores, etc), and of course if you pull out a dollar to tip the washroom attendant, you might as well not have washed your hands at all...