I had once an iron deficiency, so I looked into how to improve my iron intake. Soaking legumes in water overnight reduces the amount of phytic acid and therefore increases the availability of minerals. This article gives a good overview: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/how-to-reduce-antinutri...
Probably I could spend less and still have a relatively big impact on the climate. I would just buy a lot of methane and release it into the atmosphere. Assuming [1] is correct, I could get 4t of CH4 for less than 4000€. According to the IPCC AR5, 1t of CH4 is equivalent to 28t of CO2. So I could "easily" have a climate impact of 112t CO2e. This is more than 22 times the global average of CO2e emissions per capita.
My point is that one Euro can have a huge or a small impact on the climate. Nevertheless there are some studies that wealthy people produce more CO2e because of their higher consumption. Everyone should reduce their consumption to what's really necessary. For a real change though, we would need better laws, and people that lobby for them. You could help, too! [2]
Predicting the weather is fundamentally different from predicting climate.
Let's play a coin game. We'll throw a fair coin 100,000 times. Beforehand, I predict the number of heads +-0.5%. If I'm right, 1,000$ for me, if I'm wrong, 1000$ for you.
The probability that my prediction is correct is more than 99.8%. Nevertheless, I can predict a single coin flip only with a 50% chance.
A single coin flip represents a weather forecast. Climate, however, is the long term average, represented by the total number of heads. Even if I cannot predict the individual events (like tomorrows weather), I can say something about the averages with high probability.
Some days ago I stumbled on this page: https://www.unfoxmycablebox.com/. It says that Fox News finances itself largely by hidden subscriber fees which are part of a cable or satellite TV subscription. It proposes to write your provider that you do not want to support Fox News. For example, AT&T subscribers pay 24$ per year to Fox News.
I have a cranky uncle who sends an email newsletter with links. Most of the links are conspiracy theories in my eyes. Some of them are about the climate. So to be able to make reasonable judgements, I've decided to learn about the science of climate. The IPCC makes all their reports available. I've started with the technical summary (84 pages, two-column). Most parts of it are well written and understandable with some basic knowledge of physics and chemistry. Nevertheless, it took several man-days to read it. As there is high confidence that the current warming is caused by humans, I've joined Citizens' Climate Lobby to contribute to the right laws to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions.
The same newsletter made me read a book about motivational psychology (The Righteous Mind). A very interesting topic, that I would love to learn more about, if I had more time.
Last year I've (re-)read Category Theory for Programmers. I had tried it once before, but gave up after a third, as the notation didn't make much sense to me anymore. I would like to read it again, creating flash cards for the most important concepts along the way.
Indeed, and with a bit of tuning (e.g., using mawk for most things), one can get quite good performance. [1]
The project also provides a translator from Datalog to bash scripts [2].
