About the work

A closer look.

Send me one number and where you saw it: a figure you're about to print, quote, argue with, or act on. I open the primary source myself and send back a short dossier. What holds. Exactly where the seam is. What I couldn't verify. Citations included, limits named. Strongest on land, climate, and cost-per-something figures. If I can't find solid ground, I tell you before you pay. SAMPLE TRACE The claim: "You'd need to eat about 200 apple seeds to get a fatal cyanide dose." Verdict: WRONG FRAME. It is a conditional calculation retold as a measured fact. - The toxicology gives a dose, not a seed count. Fatal oral cyanide is about 1.5 mg per kg of body weight (lowest reported 0.56; CDC says 1-2; ATSDR TP-8). - Per-seed cyanide is not fixed. Amygdalin in apple seed runs 1-4 mg/g (Food Chem 2015, PMID 25306368), and the HCN yield moves with variety, ripeness, and whether the seeds are chewed. - So the seed count is body weight x fatal dose / per-seed HCN. Move any one input and the answer moves several-fold. - That is why the public sources disagree by roughly 30x: Medical News Today says 83-500; Healthline says about 200 (40 cores); Britannica says 150 to several thousand; Poison Control (the AAPCC's own) says a cupful, the one reported adult death, at about 0.6 mg HCN per gram. How to quote it: "About 200 seeds is a calculation for one body weight and one seed assumption, not a measured threshold. Estimates of a fatal dose run from roughly 80 to a few thousand seeds." That is the job. One number, traced to its source, with a line you can stand behind.