Daniel sent us this one — and it's coming from a pretty close-to-home place, literally. A few days ago, Sarah Tuttle Singer, the Jerusalem author, nearly died in a gas explosion in the Old City. She was living in the Armenian Quarter, and the thing that saved her life was forgetting her key. If she'd had it, she'd have been inside when the blast went off. Her home is cordoned off now, she's displaced, and Daniel knows her personally — so this isn't abstract. The prompt here is really two things. One: if you rent a place supplied with gas, what basic safety things should you actually know? And two: purely from a safety perspective, does gas deserve any place in our homes at all? Because it feels like a needless risk when alternatives exist.
This is one of those moments where a single story reorganizes how you think about an entire category of risk. Sarah described hearing a hissing sound, realizing something was wrong, stepping out to check, and then the building essentially detonated behind her. The key detail is almost too perfect as a narrative device, except it's real.
Forgetting your keys as a survival mechanism. There's a life lesson in there somewhere.
The lesson being: never be organized.
I've been training for this my whole life.
Let's take the safety question seriously, because this isn't a freak one-off. In the United States alone, there are about two hundred eighty significant residential gas explosions per year, according to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. That's more than one every two days, and that's not counting minor leaks caught in time.
Sarah's story is exceptional in its drama but not in its category. This happens a lot.
What makes gas especially insidious is that it's invisible in multiple ways. The gas itself is odorless — we add mercaptan, that rotten-egg smell, as a warning agent. But the infrastructure is also invisible. Pipes in walls, connections behind stoves, lines running under streets. You don't see degradation happening.
The mercaptan thing is one of those facts everyone sort of knows but never thinks about. Natural gas has no smell. We literally inject stink into it so our noses can detect a leak. That's already a hint that we're dealing with something fundamentally hostile.
Mercaptan isn't perfect. Some people can't smell it — there's a genetic variation that makes certain individuals anosmic to mercaptans. Also, if a leak is slow and happens in a well-ventilated space, the concentration might never reach your nose. Or if it's in a wall cavity, the gas can migrate along pipes and emerge somewhere you're not standing.
The safety net has holes. Metaphorical holes through which literal gas flows.
Let me walk through what someone renting a gas-supplied apartment should actually know. First: know where your gas shut-off valve is. In rental units it's frequently painted over, behind furniture, or in a basement you've never visited. Make sure it turns. In an emergency, you don't want to be googling "what does a gas valve look like" while smelling mercaptan. A dedicated gas shut-off wrench costs about twelve dollars and hangs on a hook near the valve. If your place doesn't have one, buy one.
The practical version: when you move in, locate the valve and actually put a wrench on it.
Second: know what gas appliances you have. Furnace, water heater, stove, dryer. Each connection point is a potential failure. Flexible connectors — the corrugated metal hoses behind stoves — have a service life. The industry recommendation is to replace them every five to ten years, and nobody does.
The connector behind the stove is the appendix of home appliances. Nobody thinks about it until it bursts.
Third: understand the difference between a gas leak and carbon monoxide. A gas leak means unburned natural gas is escaping. It smells, it can explode. Carbon monoxide is what happens when gas burns incompletely — it's odorless, it doesn't explode, it just kills you silently. You need different detectors for these. A carbon monoxide detector does not detect gas leaks. A gas detector does not detect carbon monoxide.
That distinction alone probably saves lives. Most people buy a combination smoke and CO detector and think they're covered. They're not covered for the thing that turns their apartment into a bomb.
Combination detectors that do all three exist, but they're not the default. You have to specifically look for "explosive gas detector" in the specifications. And placement matters. Natural gas is lighter than air — it rises, so gas detectors go near the ceiling. Propane is heavier — it pools near the floor, so the detector goes low. People get this wrong constantly.
The first five minutes of renting a gas apartment should be: find the valve, buy the wrench, check the connector dates, and install a gas detector at the right height. That's already more than ninety percent of tenants ever do.
Here's where I get genuinely frustrated with how we talk about gas safety. The advice is always framed as personal responsibility — check your detectors, know the smell, call the utility. But the infrastructure piece is enormous and mostly outside individual control. Gas distribution systems in many cities are shockingly old. Cast iron pipes from the nineteen twenties and thirties are still in the ground. In Boston, there are still hundreds of miles of cast iron gas mains. These pipes crack, they leak, and when gas migrates into a building through a sewer line or foundation crack — that's how you get the catastrophic explosions that level entire buildings.
The 2018 Merrimack Valley explosions in Massachusetts — overpressurized gas lines, eighty fires, one death, entire neighborhoods evacuated. That wasn't a tenant forgetting to check a connector. That was systemic.
Columbia Gas of Massachusetts was fined fifty-three million dollars for that. The root cause was a work order system that didn't account for a disconnected pressure sensor. A paperwork error led to gas surging through neighborhood lines at twelve times the safe pressure.
That's the gap between "your stove works normally" and "your house is now a fireball.
The question of whether gas deserves a place in our homes has to be answered at two levels. The individual appliance level and the system level. At the individual level, a well-maintained gas stove or furnace is not inherently dangerous. Modern appliances have flame-failure devices, thermocouples, safety valves. The technology itself can be made quite safe.
The system level is where it falls apart. Your individual stove's safety features don't protect you from a cast iron pipe corroding under the street or a contractor hitting a line during excavation.
And the distribution system is the part you have zero control over as a renter. You can't inspect the mains. You can't upgrade the pipes. You're trusting a utility whose incentives are not perfectly aligned with your safety. Gas utilities are in the business of selling gas. Infrastructure maintenance is a cost center.
The incentives problem is worth sitting with. If a water main breaks, water comes out of the ground, people see it, the utility has to fix it. If a gas main leaks, the gas dissipates into the atmosphere — or accumulates somewhere — and the utility might not even know until someone reports a smell or something explodes. The failure mode is quiet until suddenly it's catastrophic.
There's a concept in gas distribution called "lost and unaccounted for gas." It's the difference between what the utility puts into the system and what gets metered at customer locations. Nationally, it averages around one to three percent. In older systems, it can be higher. That's gas leaking into the ground, into buildings, into the atmosphere. And methane — which is what natural gas primarily is — is a potent greenhouse gas, about eighty times more warming than carbon dioxide over a twenty year period. So even the slow, non-explosive leaks are doing climate damage.
Gas is dangerous in a fast way — explosion — and a slow way — climate. It's the home appliance equivalent of smoking.
That's actually not a bad analogy. Both have an acute risk and a chronic risk, both are widely used, both have industries that spent decades downplaying the dangers, and both have alternatives that are clearly safer but face adoption friction.
Let's talk about those alternatives. Induction stoves, heat pumps — these are the things people point to.
Induction cooking is transformative. An induction cooktop uses electromagnetic fields to heat the pan directly rather than heating a surface that then heats the pan. It's faster than gas, it's more precise, and the cooktop surface stays relatively cool. From a safety perspective, there's no open flame, no combustion byproducts, and the surface cools in seconds.
The "no combustion byproducts" part is bigger than most people realize. Gas stoves emit nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and formaldehyde directly into your kitchen. A study a few years back found that gas stove use can push indoor NO2 levels above EPA outdoor standards within minutes.
The Stanford study from 2022 found that gas stoves emit methane even when they're off — just from loose fittings and connections. And the indoor air quality impact is significant enough that the American Medical Association has called for better ventilation standards and consumer warning labels. There's also emerging evidence linking gas stove use to childhood asthma — a meta-analysis estimated that about twelve percent of childhood asthma cases in the US are attributable to gas stove exposure.
That's not a rounding error. That's a public health problem hiding in people's kitchens.
The cooking experience argument for gas is getting weaker. Fifteen years ago, induction had real limitations — you needed specific pans, the temperature control was binary, the hum was annoying. Modern induction is dramatically better. If a magnet sticks to it, it works. The control is finer than gas because you're not waiting for a flame to transfer heat through air and metal. You adjust the magnetic field, and the pan responds almost instantly.
I've used both. The thing gas partisans always say is "you can't char a pepper on induction" or "you can't use a wok." And there's some truth to that. But for ninety-five percent of cooking, it's superior. And for the remaining five percent, a fifteen-dollar butane torch does the job.
The wok issue is real but solvable. There are now induction wok cooktops with a concave surface that cradles the wok. And for most home cooks, the tradeoff of losing the ability to toss food over an open flame versus not filling your home with combustion byproducts and not having a gas line that could leak — it's not a close call.
The resistance to induction is fascinating. It's not really about performance. It's cultural. Gas cooking has been marketed for decades as the professional choice, the serious cook's choice. "Now we're cooking with gas" entered the language as a synonym for doing things properly. That's marketing, not engineering.
The American Gas Association spent decades paying celebrity chefs to use gas on television and in cookbooks. They funded research that downplayed indoor air quality concerns. The playbook is straight out of the tobacco industry's strategy — create cultural attachment, fund favorable research, fight regulation. And it worked. People have an emotional relationship with the blue flame.
The blue flame is the cowboy boot of kitchen design. Symbolically potent, practically questionable.
Let me talk about heating. Gas furnaces and boilers are still the dominant heating technology in much of the northern hemisphere. The alternative here is the heat pump — essentially an air conditioner that can run in reverse. Instead of generating heat by burning something, it moves heat from outside to inside. Even when it's cold outside, there's heat energy in the air that can be extracted.
The physics of heat pumps still feels like magic to me. You're telling me that when it's freezing outside, there's enough heat in that freezing air to warm my home?
It's not magic, it's the refrigeration cycle. Modern cold-climate heat pumps can extract useful heat from air as cold as negative twenty-five Fahrenheit. They're being deployed in Maine, in Scandinavia, in places with cold winters. A gas furnace might be ninety-five percent efficient. A heat pump can have a coefficient of performance of three or four — meaning for every unit of electricity you put in, you get three or four units of heat out. Because you're not creating heat, you're moving it.
From a safety perspective: gas furnace equals combustion inside your home, carbon monoxide risk, gas leak risk, venting requirements. Heat pump equals an electrical appliance with no combustion anywhere in the system.
No gas line running into your house at all. That's the ultimate safety upgrade — removing the hazard rather than managing it. Every connection, every valve, every foot of pipe between the street main and your furnace is a potential failure point. Eliminate the pipe, eliminate the failure points.
The counterargument that always comes up is cost. Induction cooktops cost more than gas ranges. Heat pump installation costs more than swapping out a gas furnace. And electricity is more expensive per unit of energy than gas in many markets.
The cost question is real and it's the main barrier. An induction range might run eight hundred to two thousand dollars more than a comparable gas range. A whole-home heat pump installation can be ten to twenty thousand dollars, though incentives and rebates can cut that significantly. The Inflation Reduction Act included substantial heat pump and induction rebates — up to eight thousand dollars for a heat pump and up to eight hundred forty dollars for an induction stove, depending on income.
For a renter, none of that matters. You don't choose your appliances. You take what the landlord installed.
This is exactly why the renter question is different. As a renter, your agency is limited. You can't rip out the gas stove and install induction. What you can do is: install detectors, know where the shut-off is, demand that your landlord maintain the equipment, and — this is important — report gas smells immediately and persistently. Utility companies typically respond to gas odor calls within an hour, and they don't charge for it. It's one of the few responsive emergency services we have.
The "don't charge for it" part matters. People avoid calling because they're worried about a bill. Gas companies want you to call. A leak investigation is cheap for them compared to a lawsuit after an explosion.
They'd much rather send a technician with a sniffer at two in the morning than deal with the aftermath of a building-leveling explosion. The technician shows up, walks around with a combustible gas indicator, finds the leak or doesn't, and either fixes it or tells you you're imagining things. Either way, you're not getting a bill.
There's also the renter's insurance question. Most people don't think about gas explosions when they buy renter's insurance, but they should check whether their policy covers gas-related damage and displacement. Sarah's situation — her home is cordoned off, she's displaced — that's exactly what insurance is supposed to handle. But policies vary.
If you're in an older building, especially in a historic area like the Armenian Quarter, the infrastructure is not just old — it's ancient by utility standards. Jerusalem's Old City has layers of construction going back centuries. Gas lines in those areas are often retrofitted into structures that were never designed for them. The routing is irregular, the access is limited, and the inspection is harder.
Sarah's account mentioned that the gas line in her building ran through a wall in a way that made it essentially uninspectable without demolition. That's not unusual in old construction. The pipe is just... You hope it's fine.
"hope it's fine" is not a safety strategy. Let me lay out a practical checklist for anyone renting a gas-supplied place. First: on move-in day, locate the gas meter and the main shut-off valve. Put the photo somewhere you can find it in an emergency. Second: buy a combination explosive gas and carbon monoxide detector. Not just CO. Mount it according to the gas type — high for natural gas, low for propane. Third: test your stove's flame failure device. Turn on a burner, let it light, then blow it out. The gas should stop within sixty seconds. If it doesn't, report it immediately. Fourth: know the smell of mercaptan. If you've never smelled it, your gas utility will send you a scratch-and-sniff card for free. Fifth: if you smell gas, do not operate any electrical switches, do not use your phone inside, do not light a match to "find the leak" — yes, people do this — just get out and call from outside.
The "don't use your phone inside" thing sounds paranoid until you learn that a phone is an electrical device and electrical devices can generate sparks. The margin between "I'm calling for help" and "I've ignited the gas cloud" is smaller than people want to think about.
The classic case is the person who smells gas, walks into the kitchen, and flips the light switch. The tiny spark inside the switch mechanism is enough. It's not about the light being on or off — it's the act of making or breaking the electrical contact.
Your safety reflex has to be trained against your normal reflex. Normal reflex: smell something weird, turn on the light to investigate. Gas reflex: smell rotten eggs, walk out without touching anything.
This is why gas safety education is fundamentally inadequate. We tell people "if you smell gas, leave" but we don't train the muscle memory. In an emergency, people default to their habits. The only way around this is to mentally rehearse the scenario so that when it happens, the correct response is the automatic one.
Fire drills work for exactly this reason. Nobody thinks they'll panic in a fire, but everyone does. The drill creates a pathway that your brain can follow without thinking. Gas leak response should be drilled the same way.
Now let me address the bigger question head-on: does gas deserve a place in our homes? My answer has shifted over the years. As a physician, I used to think about this primarily in terms of burns and carbon monoxide poisoning — acute injuries that show up in emergency rooms. But the evidence accumulation around indoor air quality, childhood asthma, and climate impact has pushed me toward a pretty firm no. The risks are distributed — they fall on children, on renters who didn't choose their appliances, on neighbors who happen to live near a leaky main. And the benefits — slightly faster boiling, a certain aesthetic — accrue to the person who chose the gas appliance. That's a classic externality problem.
The externality framing is sharp. When you install a gas stove, you're not just making a choice for yourself. You're adding combustion byproducts to your home's air that your kids breathe. You're connecting to a distribution system that, if it fails catastrophically, can take out your neighbors too. The choice has a blast radius, sometimes literally.
The blast radius in Sarah's case was literal. The explosion didn't just affect her apartment. It damaged adjacent structures, displaced neighbors, required emergency response resources. The cost of that gas leak was socialized across the entire community.
There's a conservative argument here worth making, because it's not the usual environmental case. The conservative case against gas in homes is about resilience and self-sufficiency. A fully electric home can be powered by rooftop solar and battery storage. It's not dependent on a continental-scale just-in-time delivery system for flammable gas. If the grid goes down but you have solar and batteries, your heat pump and induction stove still work. If the gas system goes down — and it does, in earthquakes, in floods, in infrastructure failures — you have nothing.
The Texas freeze in 2021 was a demonstration of this. The gas system failed in multiple ways — wellheads froze, pipelines lost pressure, and homes with gas furnaces went cold just like homes with electric heat. But homes with solar and batteries at least had some resilience. The supposed reliability advantage of gas turned out to be contingent on a fragile system.
The fragility is distributed across thousands of miles of pipeline, hundreds of compressor stations, and millions of individual connections. A single backhoe in the wrong place can take out a neighborhood's gas supply — or worse, damage it in a way that causes a leak undiscovered for weeks.
This is the "dig once" problem. In the US, there's a national 811 "call before you dig" hotline. It works reasonably well for professional excavators. But homeowners doing DIY projects frequently skip it. A homeowner planting a tree, putting in a fence post, digging a garden bed — these are the scenarios where gas lines get hit. And the homeowner might not even realize they've nicked a line. The leak can be small, slow, and undetected for months.
The garden bed as ticking time bomb.
I want to circle back to something about Sarah's story. She described hearing a hissing sound. That hiss is the sound of gas under pressure escaping from a breach. In a quiet apartment, you can hear it. But in a city, with street noise, air conditioners running, music playing — you might not. The sensory warning only works if the environment allows it.
If you're asleep. Gas leaks don't schedule themselves for when you're awake and attentive.
Which brings up the detector point again. An explosive gas detector doesn't sleep. It doesn't have headphones on. It doesn't have a cold that blocks its sense of smell. For fifty dollars, you get an electronic nose that works twenty-four seven. If you do nothing else as a renter in a gas apartment, do that.
The fifty-dollar insurance policy against becoming a news story.
Let me address the induction adoption question from the renter's perspective, because there's actually a middle ground emerging. Portable induction burners. Single-burner units that plug into a standard outlet. They cost fifty to a hundred dollars. They're not a full kitchen replacement, but they let you do most of your cooking without turning on the gas. Boiling water, sautéing, simmering — a portable induction unit handles all of that. And you can take it with you when you move.
The portable induction burner as the renter's act of quiet rebellion against the gas line.
It's practical. I know several people who rent in older buildings with gas stoves and they use a portable induction burner for ninety percent of their cooking, only firing up the gas for things that need it — and even then, they run the vent hood on high and open a window.
The vent hood point is another one of those things that nobody does correctly. How many people actually use their range hood every time they cook? And how many range hoods actually vent outside rather than just recirculating air through a grease filter?
The recirculating hood is the safety theater of kitchen ventilation. It catches some grease particles and blows everything else back into the room. It does nothing for combustion byproducts. A proper externally vented hood, running on high, can capture a significant fraction of the pollutants from gas cooking. But studies show that even good hoods only capture about fifty to seventy percent. The rest is in your kitchen air.
Fifty to seventy percent is better than zero, but it's still a failing grade if we're talking about something that causes childhood asthma.
The hood situation in rental apartments is particularly bad. Landlords install the cheapest option, which is almost always a recirculating microwave-hood combo. It's loud, it's ineffective, and it gives tenants the false impression that they're ventilating.
The microwave-hood combo. The multitool of kitchen appliances. Does everything poorly.
To synthesize the renter's gas safety framework: detectors are non-negotiable. Know your shut-off. Report smells immediately. Consider a portable induction burner to reduce gas usage. Check your insurance. And this last one is maybe the most important: talk to your neighbors. If you smell gas in the hallway, don't assume someone else will call. If your neighbor is elderly or has a reduced sense of smell, they might not detect a leak that's slowly filling their apartment. Community-level awareness is a safety net that no detector can replace.
The neighbor point is underrated. Sarah was in a dense Old City neighborhood where people know each other. In a big apartment building where nobody talks to anyone, a gas leak could go unreported for much longer.
Urban anonymity is a risk multiplier for gas safety. The person who smells something odd but doesn't want to be a bother, the person who assumes the smell is coming from somewhere else, the person who doesn't have the landlord's number saved — these are the gaps where disaster slips through.
The answer to "does gas deserve a place in our homes" seems to be: maybe in a perfectly maintained system with redundant safety features and conscientious occupants who maintain their equipment and replace their connectors on schedule. Which is to say, in a world that doesn't exist.
The world that exists has deferred maintenance, landlord indifference, aging infrastructure, cost-cutting utilities, and human beings who forget to change the batteries in their smoke detectors, let alone their gas detectors. In that world, gas is a risk that's increasingly hard to justify given the alternatives.
The alternatives aren't futuristic anymore. Induction is here, heat pumps are here, the technology is mature. The barrier is adoption, not capability.
The barrier is also regulatory and cultural. Many US cities still have building codes that effectively require gas connections in new construction. That's changing — dozens of cities and several states have passed electrification ordinances for new buildings — but the legacy stock is enormous. Something like sixty million American homes use natural gas for heating or cooking. Retrofitting all of that is a multi-decade project.
Which makes the renter safety question all the more urgent. We're going to be living with gas in existing buildings for a long time. The question isn't "how do we eliminate gas tomorrow" — it's "how do we live with it safely until we don't have to.
Living with it safely means treating it with the respect it demands. Natural gas is an extraordinary energy source — energy-dense, pipeline-deliverable, combustion-ready. Those same properties make it extraordinarily dangerous. The infrastructure that delivers it to your stove is the same infrastructure that can level your building. That's not hyperbole. That's the physics.
Sarah forgetting her key is the kind of detail that makes you think about contingency. Most safety conversations focus on prevention — install detectors, maintain equipment, call about smells. And that's all correct. But her story is a reminder that luck plays a role too. The goal of gas safety isn't to eliminate luck from the equation — it's to make luck as small a factor as possible by handling everything that's within your control.
The key forgotten on the counter. It's almost too literary.
Real life has no shame about being on the nose.
One more practical point. If you're renting and concerned about the gas infrastructure in your building, you have the right in most jurisdictions to request a safety inspection from the gas utility. They'll send someone to check the meter, the connections, and the appliances with a combustible gas indicator. This is usually free. And if the inspector finds something, the landlord is typically required to fix it. Knowing your rights as a tenant is part of the safety equation.
The squeaky wheel gets the gas inspection.
The gas inspection might save your life. Let's talk about the municipal response. After the Merrimack Valley disaster, Massachusetts required gas utilities to develop detailed pipeline replacement plans with enforceable timelines. Other states have followed. At the federal level, PHMSA has been pushing for stricter leak detection and repair requirements. The problem is that these regulations move slowly and the existing infrastructure is vast. Replacing every mile of cast iron and bare steel pipe in the US will take decades and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
That's assuming the political will holds. Infrastructure spending isn't glamorous. Replacing a pipe that hasn't failed yet doesn't win elections.
The gas utility's dilemma is real. They're maintaining a system that, in many jurisdictions, is being actively phased out by electrification mandates. Every dollar they spend on pipe replacement is a dollar they might not recover if the customer base shrinks. The financial incentives push toward minimal maintenance and maximum extraction of value from existing assets. That's not a conspiracy theory — it's the logic of a regulated monopoly facing an existential transition.
The gas utility as the tobacco company of the energy transition. Selling a product they know is harmful, maintaining infrastructure they know is aging, while the world slowly moves toward alternatives they can't stop.
Individual renters are caught in the middle of this multi-decade transition. They didn't choose the gas line. They didn't choose the aging pipes. They just signed a lease. The least we can do is give them the information to protect themselves.
I think we've covered the renter's checklist and the safety case pretty thoroughly. Let me try to crystallize the argument about whether gas belongs in homes at all. The case against it has three pillars. One: indoor air quality and health, especially for children. Two: explosion risk from leaks anywhere in the distribution chain, from the street main to the stove connector. Three: climate impact from methane leakage. The case for it has one pillar: it works, it's familiar, and some people prefer cooking on it. That's a lopsided ledger.
The familiarity argument is weakening by the year. Every new induction owner is a convert. The "I tried induction and I'll never go back" anecdote is becoming a cliché. And the professional kitchen world is starting to shift too — not because of safety or the environment, but because induction kitchens are cooler, cleaner, and more pleasant to work in. No open flames radiating heat into an already hot kitchen.
The chef argument for gas was always a bit of a Potemkin village. Most home cooks are not chefs. They're boiling pasta and frying eggs. Induction does those things better. The wok-charring edge case is not a reason to pipe explosive gas into every home.
The wok case has solutions. There are portable butane burners that put out enormous heat for the specific task of wok cooking. Use it outside, use it under a powerful vent hood, but don't design your entire kitchen energy system around it.
The portable butane burner. The exception that proves the rule that you don't need a permanent gas line.
We should mention that butane has its own risks — it's heavier than air, it pools, and butane canisters can be hazardous if stored improperly. But the scale of the risk is different. A butane canister contains a finite amount of fuel. A gas line is connected to an effectively infinite supply.
Infinite supply, infinite blast potential. That's the asymmetry.
Where does this leave us? For renters: detectors, knowledge, vigilance, and a portable induction burner if you can swing it. For the broader question: gas is a legacy technology whose risks are increasingly well-documented and whose alternatives are increasingly superior. The transition will take decades, and in the meantime, the best we can do is be honest about what we're dealing with.
Maybe be a little more forgetful with our keys.
She gets to tell the story. I think she'd appreciate the dark humor.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the 1970s, a team of hydrologists studying tidal bore dynamics in Patagonia's Rio Gallegos famously misattributed the river's unusually steep bore front to lunar gravitational anomalies. The phenomenon was later corrected — it was actually caused by the riverbed's sudden depth change at a specific narrows, a bathymetric funnel effect. The original paper was retracted in 1983.
Bathymetric funnel effect. I'm going to pretend I know what that means.
The retraction in 1983 is the real story. Academic drama in hydrology circles.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thank you to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review — it helps other people find the show. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts.I'm Corn.
I'm Herman Poppleberry. Stay safe, check your detectors, and maybe buy a portable induction burner.
Or just forget your keys. Apparently that works too.
