Wednesday, October 1, 2014

If water damage is so bad, how come houses can be doused by rain during construction?

Mold doesn't grow IN wood. It grows in warm, damp and, importantly, dark places. Having water leak into your climate-controlled house, in between the walls or in crawl spaces is how you get mold infestations.

It's also important to note that just splashing some water on your wall will not cause mold to grow. If you soak the timber making up the frame of the house, but then you put the roof on, and the sheathing on the walls, the house dries up pretty quick, which makes it unsuitable for mold growth. As long as the spaces between the walls stays reasonably dry, even if mold spores ended up there at one time, they will die off.

To recap, in order to get mold in your house:

  • Relatively warm
  • Regularly damp
  • Reasonably dark

How do celebrities keep their cell numbers and personal emails so locked down?

Aliases. This is a big part of their lives. They use aliases whenever they travel or go to a restaurant. They usually stick with the same one, but some have three or four they use in rotation.

Account holders. A lot of celebrities, especially the wealthier ones, don't have many accounts in their actual names. Some things might be registered to a corporation or LLC. Some items might be addressed to lawyers, agents or accountants, depending on the situation.

Different contact information. Some celebrities have a work email or work cell, which they don't often use but they give out when they need to. This is typically handled on a day-to-day basis by an assistant, and is the most common way to get a hold of a celebrity. If you want to call them, you have to go through an assistant who will then forward you to a private line-- and you'll never know that number. They also might have personal email or cell that they only give to very select individuals-- truly close friends and family.

Premium accounts. A lot of services offer VIP accounts for celebrities. This helps give them preferential treatment and services that limit access from the general public.

All this requires a lot of juggling. And, yes, it gets compromised… all the time. That means abandoning old emails or cell phone numbers with great frequency. That means getting calls from strangers or fans in the middle of the night. That means losing important email in a flood of fan spam when you have to throw away an account over the weekend.

It means getting hacked and having your personal information stolen by a concerted effort or brute force attack. Having you privacy invaded, and your personal photos distributed across the internet. Then later getting blamed by the general online community because you didn't do enough to protect yourself.

Then trying to protect yourself, but realizing no matter what you do, someone-- maybe a fan, maybe some blackhat pervert, maybe a stalker with a very dark ulterior motive-- is actively trying to gain access to your life and will at some point succeed.

Why does breast cancer awareness receive more marketing and fund than prostate cancer?

Only 12% of women (~1 in 8) will develop invasive breast cancer.
Compare that to men (65+ years): 6 in 10 will develop prostate cancer (60%).

  • Prostate cancer is generally only in older men (I was kind of off the end of most charts at the age of 40), whereas breast cancer strikes women at earlier ages on average, often when they still have young families at home.
  • Prostate cancer is a slow killer. Most men who have prostate cancer do not die of prostate cancer. That is not so for breast cancer.
  • Men do not like talking about having prostate cancer, principally because even the treatment options attack masculinity. There is a high chance that the treatment will leave you impotent or incontinent or both. Since they don't talk about it, they don't engage as much in support groups or awareness movements, compared to women with breast cancer.
  • Before the 1980s, people didn't talk a lot about breast cancer, and likely for similar reasons (it's personal, it's dealing with our naughty bits, it makes people feel like less of a man/woman), but there was a women's health movement during the 1980s and '90s that really helped create awareness around breast cancer. No one has done the same for prostate cancer. OP is asking "why is X given more attention to Y," and part of the answer is "because someone went to the effort to create awareness for X, and if someone wanted to, they could do the same for Y." It didn't happen overnight. It was a long campaign that took a lot of time and effort, and we haven't seen many men becoming advocates for prostate cancer in the same way that women were willing to be advocates for breast cancer.