Octopodial Chrome

I recently came across a really brilliat idea: passiv annual heat store. The gist of it is that you dump all the excess heat your home receives in the summer into the ground, then retrieve it to remedy the heat deficiency in the winter. By so doing, apparently, one can manage a more-or-less constant 70° home temperature. In other words, it could feel like San Diego inside in the middle of a snowstorm outside. More details here.

Robert Kustig (M.D.) discusses the cause of the obesity epidemic: fructose. He’s pretty persuasive, even if his suggested solution of State action is a bit short-sighted. Why not just stop eating and drinking the stuff?

Carol Yoon pens an ode to the joys of classifying living organisms. You know, I’d not really given the subject much thought before, other than to know that it was mildly interesting, but she has some interesting factlets and whets the appetite for more.

Hat-tip to Drew.

It turns out that speed bumps are deadly: while they save lives by slowing traffic, they also end lives by slowing ambulances. Apparently for every life saved up to 85 are lost. Whoops.

Research indicates that body odour is as unique as fingerprints, and that changing diet does not change one’s fundamental smell. Could have some interesting implications for criminology.

Up to 45 million years ago, a Lebanese weevil was trapped in amber in what is now Burma; inside its body it harboured a colony of bacteria and yeast which was extracted a decade ago and is now used to brew beer. Prehistoric yeast: how cool is that?

It turns out that sunblock kills coral reeves (yes, I prefer reeves to reefs). So it looks like the choice is to burn and get cancer, or to kill coral—or to stay in the shade. I choose the shade.

Those of us who grew up camping and hiking in the 1980s and 1990s were constantly warned of the dangers of giardia lamblia and giardiasis. We were cautioned that if we ever drank water from a stream without first purifying it we risked our health and perhaps our very lives. Giardiasis was reputed to cause six months of uncontrollable diarrhœa; it was supposedly found in almost any stream, river or lake; it was bad juju.

Upon reflection, this didn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Old books are full of ways to find good water—they aren’t full of ways to purify water (although they might recommend boiling when in doubt). It always seemed a bit strange to me that the purported symptoms lasted for six months, a curiously round figure. Wild animals drink wild water, and they rarely seem to be suffering from intestinal trouble. Our ancestors—and many in the uncivilised world—drink wild water all the time. And then there are many of our fellows who do the same. I’m proud to say that I’ve been drinking water from streams for years, and I’ve never had a problem yet.

Well, it turns out that the giardia threat is massively overblown. Back in the 1980s some testing of wild water in the Sierra Nevadas was done: it turns out that the most contaminated water was purer than that found in San Francisco and that all but the two worst sites purer than that in Los Angeles. Even in other parts of the country, at the very worst sites one would need to drink almost 3 gallons of water in order to have a 50% chance of getting consuming enough giardia to have an effect.

Worse, it seems that 1 in 14 people have giardia in them already, and that the most likely path of contamination when camping is by food. Whoops.

All that said, there are plenty of other nasty microörganisms which can be found in water, and one needs to exercise some care. Areas which are commonly used by people are less safe than isolated areas; water that is stagnant is less safe than running water; it’s always safest to purify water one way or another. But really, it’s just not that big a deal.

I don’t really plan on carrying a purification kit. If I need to, I can boil it. And there’s something wonderfully tasty about ice-cold, crystal clear water from a mountain stream which runs through a stream bed lined with leaves. Iodine-tainted, bleached, boiled or filtered water are not the same thing.

On the shores of Burundi’s Rusizi River lives Gustave the man-eating crocodile. He is quite possibly the world’s largest croc, measuring 20 feet long and weighing a short ton. The article is incredible: it’s amazing how the natives still keep going back to the water, regardless of the fact that hundreds of them are slain by crocodiles.

I think this rather proves my theory that civilisation requires extinction of the megafauna. One cannot have a civilised society in which rampaging elephants or lions or crocodiles can snatch up a child—or a man. It just doesn’t work. My reader will note that all three of those animals are to be found in Africa, and that Africa is, overall, the least civilised of the continents. This is, I think, no coincidence. Australia too has its issues in the Outback—and Australia too is rife with deadly animals.

Here in North America the aboriginal inhabitants killed and ate the majority of the megafauna millennia ago. That worked to their disadvantage (lacking horses, camels or any other domesticable animals they never really got anywhere), but it’s turned out very well for us.

It turns out that dolphins kill porpoises and other dolphins for sport. Just as we saw with chimpanzees: those animals closest to us in intelligence are also closest to us in violence.