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by dungdongdang 2177 days ago
Weight from a full Year? Absolutely. Volume - probably not.

It won't take up even close to as much space as the flour. That diesel exhaust also weighs much more than the hydro(1)carbon(12) chains flour is made from, simply because things like N(14)O(16) and metals in the particulate matter are much, much heavier.

1 comments

Diesel exhaust soot density is in the 1 to 2 g/cm3 range. Flour is about 0.6 g/cm3. So the soot is indeed a bit heavier. But you can adjust the amount of flour you weigh out to visualize the volume, and it still seems like a lot. The point your parent comment was making still seems valid to me.

I could not immediately find a reference for typical soot exposure.

volume of 4mg of flour vs the 10 proposed is not "a bit heavier" - it's quite a bit less flour. A single puff of a cigarette I believe deposits about 6-20mg (depending on study) of crap into your lungs. I'm guessing about 10-15 puffs per cig.

so, 10mg/puff * 10 puffs/cig * 20cigs = 2g per pack of cigs. so the comment is saying 4-5 packs of cigs worth of soot, over a Year. that's literally nothing.

Well, it’s not literally nothing, it’s literally a massive amount of pollution. Puffing on cigarettes is literally inhaling pollution without air so I’m fairly certain you were never intending to engage in good faith in the first place.
strange. I would have thought "take 10g of flour" - something 2-5 times the comparable volume, is "never intending to engage in good faith." it's certainly a false statement.

I'm sorry, but saying the equivalent of 5 packs of cigarettes, smoked over an entire year, is "literally a massive amount of pollution," is not only in bad faith, it's quite literally crazy thinking.

my intention was for facts. I guess by your definition, facts and calculations are "bad faith," and "good faith" is screaming the sky is falling.

here's another comparison. we shed about half a kilo of skin per year. when you cough up a loogie, that's a couple of grams by the way, for that one loogie. that comes from your lungs too.

When did we go from grams to milligrams?

And sure, weigh out ten grams of sand or powdered charcoal if you're worried about the density. This is an order of magnitude estimate, so a factor of two here or there is nothing.

right. and something like 4g of sand is a very small volume. ever cough up a mucus thing when you're sick? that's about the same weight for a couple of those. so smoke from smoking under 5 packs of cigs over a full year. we probably get that amount over a year from second-hand smoke. There are plenty of people who smoke a pack a day. This is one cig every 3 days. Tiny amount, easily cleared out. the flour example would be a cig every day. I'd say that's a pretty big difference. kinda like going 30 vs going 90 on a side street in your car.

As far as your question - I'm not sure what you're asking here. the soot statistic is in grams. the statistic for weight of crap in cig smoke is per puff, and is in mg. when you add up the crap in a pack of cigs, it's about 2000mg as the simple arithmetic shows. you are free to google factor/label method, or take an 8th grade science class.