Words to live by. Thanks, John.
Monthly Archives: August 2008
It's Not Just Crumbling Bridges...
Infrastructure is a major problem for moving forward into any sort of vision of a new green economy. This article in the New York Times is a little depressing. The electrical transmission infrastructure simply isn't there to allow us to take full advantage of green energy generation technologies (e.g., wind farms or large solar arrays in deserts). Let's hope that we can get serious about the substantial investments that need to be made to turn this country (and our world) around. It might help if we could stop hemorrhaging money from ill-conceived wars.
Freedom to Dry
I learned a shocking fact today in Allison Arieff's opinion piece in the New York Times this morning. According to Arieff, 40% of homeowners associations in the United States forbid the use of clotheslines to dry clothes. She also brought to my attention the fabulous advocacy group Project Laundry List. Of course, there is one small problem with this site's Top 10 Reasons to Hang Out Your Clothes list on its front page. Reason number five is "Sunlight bleaches and disinfects." This may very well be true, however, the hypertext citation they give takes you to the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. This first quote on the Institute's page is from Justice Louis Brandeis from 1933:
Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.
I think that Brandeis meant a more metaphorical sunlight when he was commenting on the virtues of investigative journalism. Perhaps we had better find a better citation for the disinfectant properties of sunlight.
Great site and great cause nonetheless. Hanging up your clothes is a great way to save 5% on your home energy consumption.
Pentailed Treeshrews Not Cheap Dates
A recent paper in PNAS documents the alcohol consumption patterns of pentailed treeshrews (Ptilocercus lowii) in Southeast Asian rainforests. These treeshrews consume fermented nectar on a daily basis from the flower buds of the bertam palm (Eugeissona tristis). The alcohol content of the fermented nectar averages 0.6% but gets as high as 3.8%. A proportionate amount of alcohol consumed by a human would be intoxicating but the treeshrews show no signs of intoxication.
The pentailed treeshrew resembles treeshrews that lived more than 55 million years ago and are believe to be ancestral to modern treeshrews and, more interestingly from an anthropocentric perspective, Primates. An interesting open question that remains from this work is how the treeshrews manage to not get blotto on rainforest palm wine.
Cool paper, but I'm still struggling to parse this beauty of a sentence:
Nonetheless, alcohol intake in a living model for ancestral primates speaks against the claim that the sensitivity of basic biochemical pathways of normal learning to ingested alcohol could only evolve in the absence of dietary alcohol.
Whatever that means...
Hans Rosling and Interactive Graphics
This is a relative oldie but a goodie that just re-appeared in my inbox. Professor Hans Rosling from the Karolinska Institute debunks a number myths about the distribution of wealth and health in the world. It is an amazing demonstration of the power of interactive graphics to communicate complex information.
More Crocodile Pansteatitis
About a month ago, I posted on the mysterious deaths of crocodiles in the Olifants river system in Kruger National Park, South Africa. A recent update indicates that the cause of the fatal pansteatitis outbreak is still unknown despite intensive study. An interdisciplinary research captured 11 live crocodiles and found that seven of them were afflicted by pansteatitis. This is a scary prevalence rate. The media release strangely refers to these cases as "infections," but this is probably not correct as pansteatitis is typically caused by environmental poisons (e.g., rancid fat from spoiled fish). The current theory is that the crocs are acquiring the poisoning from eating the carcasses of other afflicted crocs. The intervention park managers are attempting now is to burn the bodies of dead crocs recovered by rangers. So far, rangers have counted 130 crocodile carcasses in the park.
The Mediterranean Diet and the New Food Pyramid
Nina Simonds's website has a cool video of Walter Willett, author of the terrific book Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy, and professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. Willett is one of the chief advocates of the Mediterranean diet, which stresses a diet rich in fresh fruits and vegetables, grains, fish and the consumption of healthy fats. The paradox of the Mediterranean diet is that while it is relatively high in the proportion of total calories derived from fat, the incidence of cardiovascular disease in Mediterranean countries is low relative to the United States. A big part of this story probably lies in the types of fats consumed. Olive oil, which is rich in LDL-reducing monounsaturated fat, is the principal cooking fat in the canonical Mediterranean diet. This is probably not the entire story since there are, in fact, plenty of parts of the Mediterranean world where olive oil is not the primary cooking fat, but evidence nonetheless points to many health benefits of a diet where olive oil is substituted for much of the animal fat.
A diet that permits you, nay, encourages you to eat fried calamari (as long as it's fried in canola oil) and drink red wine is all right by me!