I'm getting so frustrated anymore trying to use google, bing, brave search, startpage, etc for finding anything except reddit or quora answers and business pages. If you find any more info on marsupials and peppers, I'd love to see it. It's a super interesting question.

I'm pretty confident with berries as I've got plenty of experience, but I don't mess with wild carrot or even elderberry as I don't feel I have the knowledge at this point to make it worth the risk. There are just too many lookalikes.

Folks visiting the desert and distractedly running straight into octillos is just good entertainment. There's not much on the east coast that prepares you for a random shrub to be so hostile. Poisonous berries though, they're everywhere. I'm surprised your fellows made it to adulthood without basic suburban survival skills.

A couple months from now, I'll have the same situation, except it will be 95 F outside after a long, hot work day and I'll jack the AC up to get down to a comfortable body temperature. Once I cool off, the AC on full blast will be way too cold to tolerate.

Thankfully, I've got an 8-year-old base model car that allows me to do all that with physical dials that don't take my attention off the road. I can't imagine what it would take to program an "auto" mode that knows how long it takes for my body to reach a comfortable temperature after being out in the elements. I think I'd lose my mind if my car just blithely set itself to 70 degrees and assumed that would work for me. That may be an option for office workers in milder climates, but they're not the only ones buying cars.

If we're going as simple as time to a wild animal, we've had fox in the front yard and I see turkey and deer within a couple of blocks of my place often enough that I wonder if they don't sometimes order at the fast food drive thrus on either end of the neighborhood. I live as far from a cornfield as I ever have right now and that doesn't seem to phase the wildlife.

Back to the article though, they seem to be measuring the distance from town to rural surroundings. At no point do they mention wilderness, rugged landscape, or any kind of danger from the environment. They're measuring to the nearest bit of pasture. Things that can eat you don't factor into it.

I will not allow myself to purchase a deep fat fryer because it's not healthy to live exclusively off of fried potatoes and associated toppings.

This is not the case at all. A weld almost always weakens the base material. And you don't just use whatever steel is the cheapest to build a ship. You use what is appropriate to the use case. There are cheaper and more expensive options within that category, but you make it sound like you can just grab whatever is cheapest in the yard that day.

There's so much that goes into material selection and handling that this comment confidently hand waves away.

Anyway, I'm not a fan of that particular style of pop-history article myself. I much prefer an article written by someone who is capable of doing research and interpreting sources.

https://www.britannica.com/story/do-sharks-really-die-if-the...