Headline from the New York Times on May 30, 1907:

The May 24, 1907 NYT has the following prediction by the Surgeon General of Illinois:

"The methods for the prevention of diseases, which have developed wonderfully in the last few years, lead me to believe that the outlook for the elimination of the white plague [tuberculosis] is very hopeful. Those affected will be isolated, and if this is done, preventives may be used until consumption will be a thing of the past.

The great work to be done is in medicine, for surgery long ago has reached almost its limit of perfection. Simplification in surgery will develop, but I think no great discovery in that branch of the profession remains to be made. In fact, I think that the greatest triumphs of surgery have been attained, and to make them more accessible will be the work of the future.

As the medical profession in late years has discovered the causes of the worst diseases, it will only be a question of time when preventatives will be generally used. The outlook, then, is that the human race will be better physically than it has ever been."

It's finally been said, by a "family planning" professor (whatever that is):

"Children 'bad for planet'"

The scarily-named Optimum Population Trust says that families should have two rather than three kids for the sake of the planet. Prof. Guillebaud says that "when couples are planning a family they should be encouraged to think about the environmental consequences."

There is this curious bit: after the story describes how virtually all world population growth will come from poor, not wealthy, nations, Prof. Guillebaud says "rich countries should be the most concerned about family size as their children have higher per capita carbon dioxide emissions." So it seems that poor countries have too many kids and rich countries have too many wasteful kids. Of course, with fewer brains rich countries probably won't stay rich; they'll become poor and start spitting out rugrats again.

Well, let's reason this out. People of such mind usually perceive humans as a virus on the planet (thank you, Agent Smith), so why stop at two kids? The Optimum Population is obviously zero, when humans will no longer foul up the planet. It seems the Optimum Population Trust could be doing more effective things to reach this goal than releasing reports. Just ask Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, all unknowingly devoted to erasing carbon footprints from the world.

And why does it have to be fewer kids? Why can't we get rid of other people instead? Kids are too cute. Let's wait to see if Prof. Guillebaud becomes a martyr for his own cause. But I'm sure he'd tell us he's not the problem, it's "other people" who are the problem.

And don't trees like carbon dioxide? I wish these population-control types weren't so anti-arboreal.

According to this article in Environmental Science and Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society:

E85 (85% ethanol fuel, 15% gasoline) may increase ozone-related mortality, hospitalization, and asthma by about 9% in Los Angeles and 4% in the United States as a whole relative to 100% gasoline. Ozone increases in Los Angeles and the northeast were partially offset by decreases in the southeast. E85 also increased peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN) in the U.S. but was estimated to cause little change in cancer risk. Due to its ozone effects, future E85 may be a greater overall public health risk than gasoline. However, because of the uncertainty in future emission regulations, it can be concluded with confidence only that E85 is unlikely to improve air quality over future gasoline vehicles. Unburned ethanol emissions from E85 may result in a global-scale source of acetaldehyde larger than that of direct emissions.

The April 23, 1907 NYT reports on some strange events in upstate New York:

NIAGRA, N.Y. - The American falls went dry to-day in sections owing to the immense ice fields forced down from Lake Erie by a tremendous gale. Where the full sweep of water usually plunges over there were four separate falls, presenting a very peculiar sight.

A massive ice bridge has formed in the gorge.

On Saturday it snowed in Arlington, TX. Granted, it didn't snow enough to stick to the roads or the grass, but it snowed enough so that our two year old recognized the precipitation as snow. How crazy is that?

Around the Southeast it was rather cold over the past weekend, and I am sure many were like me: either wondering where the global warming was when we needed it or thanking our stars for global warming (otherwise the cold would have been that much worse). For our good friends north of, say, Nashville, I hear your chuckles, but one reason I stick close to home (at least in terms of latitude) is the cold - more specifically the relative lack thereof.

Notwithstanding the past weekend's freakish weather, the statists qua global warming advocates will not be dissuaded. One hypothesis, which if true would be the end of the endless stream of "protocols," is that contemporaneous weather patterns are reflective of a "100 year cycle." With about as much scientific method as most (non-scientist) advocates of global warming put forth, I mention this story from the April 9, 1907 NYT:

Ballston [New York], April 8 - This vicinity to-day...had a snowstorm which almost assumed the proportions of a blizzard. More than eight inches of snow have fallen.

The April 7, 1907 NYT reports on French scientists who are trying to market tobacco that has been purged of nicotine ostensibly for health reasons:

The Government, which has a monopoly of the manufacture and sale of tobacco, put on the market this week a variety of caporal, a common form of pipe and cigarette tobacco, which had been freed of nicotine.

This step was taken as a result of experiments on rabbits. An infusion of ordinary caporal tobacco was injected into the veins of a rabbit, which died five weeks later. A post mortem examination showed that the aorta was covered with large spots due to arteriosclerosis. Another rabbit was subjected to a similar test with nicotineless caporal. This rabbit lived two months and was then put to death. The aorta was found perfectly healthy.

This Congressional Research Service white paper concerning climate change reports the amount of spending on "Climate Change Science" by the federal government since FY1989. Annual spending peaked in FY2004 at just under $2 billion.

The total amount of spending since 1989? $32.5 billion in 2005 dollars (through FY2007)!!

In some sense, the spending might be a small price to pay if it were possible to come to a conclusion about what is causing climate change and if we (humans or the United States, depending on your viewpoint) can or want to do anything about it. However, if we did come to a conclusion, would it be politically feasible for either political party to reduce the spending on climate change science?

Two billion dollars is about one half of the economy of Arlington, Texas.

From the March 3, 1907 NYT:

I think with elevators, Ritz restaurants, cafes, palm gardens, flats, gymnasiums, Turkish baths, and swimming tanks, the limit of luxury [on transatlantic ocean liners] has been reached, though perhaps they may yet introduce billiard tables and bowling alleys.

In the olden days it was almost impossible to hear from home, after sailing from port, until we reached home again...To-day it is not only proper and intelligible, but an every day occurrence, and a message so addressed can be sent from almost any village in the States or Great Britain with an almost absolute certainty of reaching its destination...A great service the "wireless" has done for seaman is the possibility to acquaint other ships and land stations of any accident to ship or engines, and to call for aid or allay the fears of otherwise anxious friends. The value of the wireless installation on board the several disabled liners during the great hurricanes of February, 1899, cannot be estimated. [emphasis added]

The Feb. 6, 1907 NYT reports on the incredible cold that grips the upper Midwest and the plains (sound familiar?):

ST. PAUL - With few exceptions there has been severe weather in this section for seventeen days, and for three days the thermometers have registered 22 degrees below zero.

In North Dakota 30 degrees below was common, and this was coupled with terrific blizzards. For days the main lines of the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie, the Great Northern, and the Northern Pacific Railroad have been blocked, and many of the branch lines have been at a standstill for weeks and months.

To the average layman that sounds reasonable - who remembers the last time it was 30 degrees below zero in North Dakota? Not too many people in Texas at least. However, while such stories in the NYT from 1907 do not constitute a statistical test, it is suggestive that extreme weather events have occurred in the past (what created the Grand Canyon?) and makes one wonder about the veracity/intention of implied claims to the contrary.

From the Jan. 13, 1906 NYT:

Everyone knows that this has been a mild Winter, but just what has made it so is a problem about which the weather experts are divided. A few days ago Capt. Chaplin of the British steamer Shimosa reached the Port of New York after a long and decidedly foggy voyage from China. The weather was so remarkably unseasonable that Capt. Chaplin took some observations that revealed the fact, not noticed as yet by other mariners, that the Gulf Stream has been undergoing certain deviations from its normal course which are of a sufficiently radical nature, according to the theories of some meteorologists, to account for the extreme climactic changes which have taken place this winter.

The Jan. 11, NYT prints a letter to the editor concerning the upcoming Auto Show in New York City's Madison Square Garden:

Possibly no invention ever installed itself as a vital institution in the life of the world as quickly and as firmly as the automobile. It is not many years ago that we were wont to stare and gape at it in passing with much the same bewilderment that we now bestow upon a balloon or a submarine boat. The automobile is an absolute fixture. It filled a want, and when that want became evident the development of the automobile was assured. No more striking testimony is needed than the standardization of parts by manufacturers, which goes far to prove the thorough organization of the automobile business.

The automobile, unlike many inventions, owes its speedy development to the fact that it is the product of many mechanics, engineers, capitalists, and sporting men - all aiming at one central idea, a speedy, strong, and easily controlled road wagon. There have been many ingenious ideas advanced, including not a few madcap theories, but as is the case with every evolution, be it animal or mechanical, there has been a survival of fitness. We see that fitness embodied in the present motor car, which is notable for the absence of freak ideas. It is a sane machine.

It looks like Viagra might be effective against pulmonary edema (fluid leakage in the lungs caused by high blood pressure).

High Altitude Pulmonary Edema (HAPE) and High Altitude Cerebral Edema (HACE) are serious and potentially lethal risks for mountain climbers at elevations starting above 10,000'.

I've never had any problems with Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS), much less anything more serious like HAPE or HACE, as high as 13,000', but they say it can strike anyone anytime. (Kilimanjaro, my next mountain, is 19,340'--by far the tallest I've ever attempted.)

Now the question is this: Do you really want your mountain climbing buddy, sleeping in a two man tent, at high altitude, days away from the nearest female companionship, popping Viagra?

It is said that democratic governments are myopic, scarecely looking beyond the next election. "Not so we the British," say...uhm, the British. This BBC story tells of a far reaching study, released today by UK's Office of Science and Innovation.

The 246 summary papers, called the Sigma and Delta scans, were complied by futures researchers, Outsights-Ipsos Mori partnership and the US-based Institute for the Future (IFTF).

The papers look forward at emerging trends in science, health and technology.

The scans explore a diverse range of areas from the future of the gulf stream and the economic rise of India, to developments in nanotechnology and the threat posed by HIV/Aids.

Perhaps the most tantalizing futurist prediction? Rights for robots.

The paper which addresses Robo-rights, titled Utopian dream or rise of the machines? examines the developments in artificial intelligence and how this may impact on law and politics.

The paper says a "monumental shift" could occur if robots develop to the point where they can reproduce, improve themselves or develop artificial intelligence.

The research suggests that at some point in the next 20 to 50 years robots could be granted rights.

If this happened, the report says, the robots would have certain responsibilities such as voting, the obligation to pay taxes, and perhaps serving compulsory military service.

Conversely, society would also have a duty of care to their new digital citizens, the report says.

With apologies to Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov et al., HT: Wired blog

A new study covered in Runner's World:

An Austrian study that made worldwide headlines last week suggesting a link between marathon running and skin cancers, possibly including the dangerous malignant melanoma (MM), turns out to be somewhat less worrisome than many news reports indicated. Of course, sun exposure is a known cause of skin cancers, and runners do go out in the sun (in skimpy clothing), so they should be careful. But the research study uncovered no melanomas among either the 210 marathoners or the 210 control group members, and never attempted to measure skin cancer incidence. "On clinical examination, no skin lesions suggestive of MM were diagnosed in either group," wrote the authors, a group of running aficionadoes and marathoners/triathletes from the University of Graz in Graz, Austria.

However, the marathoners clearly had more liver spots and atypical moles, and received more referrals, than the control subjects. Of particular interest to runners, all three findings were associated with increased levels of training. In other words, those who trained the most (over 44 miles a week) had more liver spots, atypical moles, and referrals than those who trained less. Presumably, the more you train, the more time you spend in the sun. Here's the data on miles/week of training and incidence of atypical moles, liver spots, and "referrals."

A letter to the editor in the Nov. 28, 1906 NYT continues the cigarette "debate":

If "M.C." in writing yesterday on the evil of cigarette smoking, referred to Gen. Grant's death as caused by cigarette smoking, he was certainly mistaken, as the cancer of the throat was caused by "dry" (unlighted) smoking of cigars to an excessive extent.

Every crime on the calendar has been charged to the cigarette although the crimes were prevalent before the cigarette.

The real danger in cigarette smoking is that the smoke is invariably inhaled, while the cigar smoker rarely does so, an argument which few use.

With the Reuters descriptions:

This Hubble image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies. As the two galaxies smash together, billions of stars are born, mostly in groups and clusters of stars. The brightest and most compact of these are called super star clusters. (NASA, ESA/Hubble, and B. Whitmore - Space Telescope Science Institute/Handout/Reuters)

The Andromeda spiral galaxy is shown in this infrared image taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and released by on October 18, 2006. Astronomers have new evidence that the Andromeda spiral galaxy was involved in a violent head-on collision with the neighboring dwarf galaxy Messier 32 (M32) more than 200 million years ago. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/D. Block - Anglo American Cosmic Dust Lab, SA/Handout/Reuters)

One of my favorite websites is summitpost which has fantastic amounts of information about mountain hiking/climbing. It's a "wiki" style site where users host and edit individual pages about mountains, routes, etc.

Users also post some amazing pictures:

Health experts in the UK are warning the public that snorting cocaine through a rolled-up banknote poses a serious health risk. Not from the cocaine -- from the banknote, which can harbor droplets of blood and thereby pass Hepatitis C from snorter to snorter.

ABC news ran two global-warming stories today. The first was Branson’s giveaway; the second was not news, but a revisit of the dying polar bears story. These are excerpts from an article cited by cei.org that calls this report into question.

One polar bear population (western Hudson Bay) has declined since the 1980s and the reproductive success of females in that area seems to have decreased. We are not certain why, but it appears that ecological conditions in the mid-1980s were exceptionally good.

Climate change is having an effect on the west Hudson population of polar bears, but really, there is no need to panic. Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present.

It is noteworthy that the neighbouring population of southern Hudson Bay does not appear to have declined, and another southern population (Davis Strait) may actually be over-abundant.

I understand that people who do not live in the north generally have difficulty grasping the concept of too many polar bears in an area. People who live here have a pretty good grasp of what that is like to have too many polar bears around.

By the way, Charlie Gibson closes the report by saying that scientists have documented a 20% population decline in Western Canada since the 1980s. Good work: Select your subset of the poplulation, select your endpoints, and fit your trend line. I never knew model estimation was so easy.

Thomas Bray's comments on implications of DDT policy:

Researchers haven't even been able to show conclusively that DDT is the cause of widely-cited declines in populations of eagles and other animals. There appeared to be a strong correlation, but the type of DDT use being recommended by WHO - indoor spraying to reduce the risk of mosquito bites to sleeping humans - is no threat to nature. All this was known more than three decades ago, but so powerful had the environmental lobby become that rational decision-making was all but impossible.

There is an important lesson here. Policy decisions that aren't based on a cold, hard appreciation of costs and benefits, as well as solid science, cost lives.

Citing the so-called "precautionary principle," advocates of such controls [to reduce greenhouse emissions] argue that we must act even before all the facts are in. To delay is to risk catastrophe down the road, they assert. But insofar as the precautionary principle is valid, it might offer a strong reason not to act too quickly. The one thing we know about government, after all, is that it often gets things wrong - as it did with DDT.

The Royal Society announces their archive of 350 years of articles is freely available through the end of the calendar year. From the front page:

For the first time the Archive provides online access to all journal content, from Volume One, Issue One in March 1665 until the latest modern research published today ahead of print. And until December the archive is freely available to anyone on the Internet to explore.

Spanning nearly 350 years of continuous publishing, the archive of nearly 60,000 articles includes ground-breaking research and discovery from many renowned scientists including: Bohr, Boyle, Bragg, Cajal, Cavendish, Chandrasekhar, Crick, Dalton, Darwin, Davy, Dirac, Faraday, Fermi, Fleming, Florey, Fox Talbot, Franklin (pictured), Halley, Hawking, Heisenberg, Herschel, Hodgkin, Hooke, Huxley, Joule, Kelvin, Krebs, Liebnitz, Linnaeus, Lister, Mantell, Marconi, Maxwell, Newton, Pauling, Pavlov, Pepys, Priestley, Raman, Rutherford, Schrodinger, Turing, van Leeuwenhoek, Volta, Watt, Wren, and many, many more influential science thinkers up to the present day.

Here's a link to Crick and Watson (1953) whose innocent sounding abstract is as follows:

This paper describes a possible structure for the paracrystalline form of the sodium salt of deoxyribonucleic acid. The structure consists of two DNA chains wound helically round a common axis, and held together by hydrogen bonds between specific pairs of bases. The assumptions made in deriving the structure are described, and co-ordinates are given for the principal atoms. The structure of the crystalline form is discussed briefly.

A recent Wall Street Journal article suggests that the WHO, unlike much of the UN, has taken temporary leave of its insanity:

The World Health Organization, in a sign that widely used methods of fighting malaria have failed to bring the catastrophic disease under control, plans to announce today that it will encourage the use of DDT, even though the pesticide is banned or tightly restricted in much of the world.

The new guidelines from the United Nations public-health agency support the spraying of small amounts of DDT, or dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, on walls and other surfaces inside homes in areas at highest risk of malaria. The mosquito-borne disease infects as many as 500 million people a year and kills about a million. Most victims are in sub-Saharan Africa and under the age of 5.

HT to Jeff Hoffman, who expresses hope that some bureaucrats are coming to see the importance of marginal analysis. I'm less sanguine.

Consumer Reports has weighed in on E85, one of the most massive boondoggles of our time. Some salient points:

E85, which is 85 percent ethanol, emits less smog-causing pollutants than gasoline, but provides fewer miles per gallon, costs more, and is hard to find outside the Midwest.

Government support for flexible-fuel vehicles, which can run on E85, is indirectly causing more gasoline consumption rather than less.

E85 is unlikely to fill more than a small percentage of U.S. energy needs.

On the last point, Consumer Reports is mute on the question of what will fill those needs. One alternative that I suspect is seldom mentioned in the circles in which CR writers move is nuclear energy. A particularly promising alternative is the pebble bed reactor.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds (aka Instapundit) reports:

Meanwhile, in Britain, environmental guru James Lovelock has called for the deployment of nuclear power to fight global warming, but other environmentalists are horrified at the thought. At least, however, the subject is being debated after decades of being off the table entirely.

Further, Reynolds points to a development that might make nuclear power ever safer than it already is:

The Chinese seem to be on the right track. Pebble-bed technology looks to be both feasible and safe (and it's only one alternative), and it seems unlikely that the world can sustain another 50 years (or even 20) of economic growth on the scale of recent decades while depending on oil and coal -- at least, not without unpleasant side effects.

For more than you want to know about pebble-bed technology, see Wikipedia. An excerpt:

The pebble bed reactor (PBR) or pebble bed modular reactor (PBMR) is an advanced nuclear reactor design. This technology claims a dramatically higher level of safety and efficiency. Instead of water, it uses pyrolytic graphite as the neutron moderator, and an inert or semi-inert gas such as helium, nitrogen or carbon dioxide as the coolant, at very high temperature, to drive a turbine directly. This eliminates the complex steam management system from the design and increases the transfer efficiency (ratio of electrical output to thermal output) to about 50%. Also, the gases do not dissolve contaminants or absorb neutrons as water does, so the core has less in the way of radioactive fluids and is more economical than a light water reactor.

Now that the astronomers have purged Pluto from the planetary club - shock to the astrologers, I am sure - I wonder what would be purged from economics if it were put to a vote?

My votes:

Keynesian stimulus
Most of what Marx/EnglesEngels (see, I read the comments!) wrote

That's my short list after fifteen seconds of thought.

I mentioned that last week there was a release of data pertaining to about 20 million AOL searches and how AOL tried to put the genie back in the bottle. Unfortunately for AOL and AOL users, the data have been stored on a number of mirror sites, and incorporated into Splunk'd which is a large data mining program. Heck, for some reason even I downloaded the data, all 439 MB of it. For giggles, I tried to read the data into STATA, but that didn't work very well with the limited resources of my laptop.

Nevertheless, for those who would like to see some of the data, here are the first 100,000 searches in a 40MB STATA data file

This article at Slate.com describes a taxonomy of seven types of Internet searchers:

1. The Pornhound
2. Manhunter
3. Shopper
4. Obsessive
5. Omnivore
6. Newbie
7. The Basket Case

I qualify myself as an Omnivore.

Here's a link to Splunk'd [I can only get it to work in IE - dangit]. I especially like the display searches by time option. You could spend a lot of time at Splunk'd but I did three quick searhces: approximately 1100 searches had the term "economics," 580 searches with "Sheehan" (mostly in March 2006 and then dropping off considerably), and 1,920 searches for "Tom Cruise." That says something, but I am not sure what.

Perhaps it doesn't mean anything, yet for what it's worth, here are some weather reports from the Aug. 7, 1906 NYT:

"Yesterday was the hottest day of 1906 and the hottest Aug. 6 in twenty-five years...Yesterday the mercury ran up three degrees higher than it went Sunday...In consequence there were fourteen deaths and the prostrations numbered nearly one hundred...The mercury rose to 92 on Sunday. Yesterday it reached 93...some retrospective comfort may be gotten out of the stated fact that on Sept. 7, 1881, the mercury rose to 100 degrees in New York...

WASHINGTON - At 3 o'clock this afternoon the thermometer at the Weather Bureau registered 95 degrees while the unofficial thermometers on the street scored 103 in the shade and as high as 120 in the sun.

BALTIMORE - There were three prostrations from heat in this city to-day, none of them proving fatal, however...The thermometer registered 98 degrees...This temperature has not been exceeded here for several years.

PHILADELPHIA - The temperature in this city to-day reached a maximum of 94 degrees...A number of deaths and prostrations were reported by the police.

Eight die in Manhattan, six in Brooklyn...pet terrier goes mad and attacks owner, is shot by policeman...man commits suicide on Coney Island, ostensibly driven mad by the heat.

From the Annals of Improbable Research:

Hair Soy Sauce: A Revolting Alternative to the Conventional by Alexander Tse-Yan Lee

The study is available here

AND

"Cannibal Crickets On A Forced March for Protein and Salt," Stephen J. Simpson, Gregory A. Sword, Patrick D. Lorch and Iain D. Couzin, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 103, no. 11, March 14, 2006, pp. 4152-6.

This study is available here

It is interesting to read the weather forecasts from the early 1900s. They are almost too general, they come with very little specifics. I am no meteorologist, but I wonder if it is because a) the science of forecasting the weather was not fully developed, and/or b) there was little reason for most people (beyond farmers, perhaps?) to be terribly concerned about the detailed specifics of the weather.

Here's an example, from the July 30, 1906 NYT:

The Weather Bureau forecast for Monday and Tuesday in the cotton States is as follows:

North Carolina - Showers Monday; Tuesday, partly cloudy; fresh west to northwest winds.

South Carolina - Occasional showers Monday and probably Tuesday; light to fresh southwesterly winds.

Georgia - Showers Monday; warmer in northwest portion; Tuesday, fair; warmer in northern, showers in souther, portion.

Eastern Florida - Showers Monday and probably Tuesday; variable winds.

Western Florida and Alabama - Showers Monday; Tuesday partly cloudy and warmer.

Mississippi - Partly cloudy Monday; warmer in southeast portion.

Louisiana - Generally fair Monday and Tuesday; warmer Monday in southeast portion.

Eastern Texas - Fair Monday and Tuesday.

Western Texas - Fair Monday and Tuesday.

In a separate article, there is a table of temperatures in New York City - one of the first I have come across. The notes to the table suggest the following:

The average temperature yesterday was 76; for the corresponding date last year it was 74; average on the corresponding date for the last twenty-five years, 73.

This isn't really a science issue, but I notice that the heat wave of 2006 is very similar to reports of the heat (and shortages of ice, with subsequent price increases/investigations/indictments/outrage) in 1906.

From the July 20, 1906 NYT:

The Fifteenth Regiment of United States Cavalry from Fort Ethan Allen, Burlington, Vt., arrived early this afternoon at Hoosick, four mile south of this place [Hoosick Falls, N.Y.], after a fifteen-mile march from Shaftsbury, Vt., where they spent the previous afternoon and night.

The heat, which made the march unbearable during the first four days, was the source of much trouble to-day, many horses having become exhausted and dropped in their tracks. Most of the animals were able to continue the journey after their loads had been removed, but several died. Just before the camp at Hoosick was reached two horses dropped dead.

The heat has prostrated more than fifty men since the march commenced, last Saturday. At to-night's company review twelve in line fainted, and nearly all the men showed signs of great fatigue. Evening parade was dispensed with owing to the condition of the men and horses.

What is obviously missing is the warnings that we receive today.

Bonking is, of course, slang for running out of energy during exercise. It usually happens when the working muscles run low on glycogen, which is the body's limiting fuel source for sustained activity.

Bonking is something you'd never want to do on purpose. Or would you?

Believe it or not, one highly respected exercise scientist has suggested that it may be beneficial to bonk regularly in training.

ATSRTWT

From the June 23, 1906 NYT:

AUGUSTA, Ga - A special from Athens says during a hail storm in Clark (sic) and Oconee Counties great damage was done. In some places the hail fell to a level of fourteen inches. Pine trees for miles were stripped of their foliage.

In Clark (sic) county the storm was about 2 mile wide and seven miles long. In Oconee it was two miles wide and ten miles long. Corn, cotton, and other crops in the path of the storm were totally destroyed.

If all that is needed to "prove" the downside of global warming is weather variablity, then all those folks should come to Texas - as they say here "if you don't like the weather, wait ten minutes."

My biggest problem with the whole debate is that the global warming issue and what to do about it is simply too easy for totalitarians and totalitarians-in-training to hijack.

From this BBC story:

Italian researchers say eating pizza could protect against cancer.

Researchers claim eating pizza regularly reduced the risk of developing oesophageal cancer by 59%.

The risk of developing colon cancer also fell by 26% and mouth cancer by 34%, they claimed.

Tyler Cowen is worried about the bird flu. So worried that he started a blog (now dormant) devoted entirely to it.

Gillian Air, influenza virus expert and Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Oklahoma, writes today in the Oklahoman (registration required) that fears of a bird flu pandemic are overblown. Here are the money quotes:

An avian influenza pandemic might produce good ratings for a made-for-television movie, but in reality the risk to the majority of people is almost nonexistent right now. …The facts do not point to an impending pandemic.

… Although the virus has met many prerequisites for the start of a pandemic, it still does not have an ability to spread efficiently among humans.

…The picture in Indonesia strongly suggests that there is a rare gene in the human population that makes some humans susceptible to bird flu while the vast majority are either resistant to the infection or get a very mild infection.

From the May 19, 1906 NYT:

Prof. Hans Molisch of Prague, according to the London Mail, has been able to read a newspaper by the mircobic glow emanating from a sausage.

All meat - beef as often as in 52 cases out of 100 and veal in 50 out of 100 - contains the microbe, which projects a greenish-white light. With sausages it is not so frequent, but is, when present, much stronger....

Prof. Molisch asserts that the presence of these microbes in meat is no sign of decay, but rather the contrary, as in no case have they been found in meat unfit for human consumption.

Step 1: Create a problem.

President Clinton issued an Executive Order June 12 extending the current moratorium on the leasing of oil drilling sites on the outer continental shelf of the United States to June 30, 2012.

[Story.]

Step 2: "Fix" a problem.

WASHINGTON -- Scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs will be able to vie for a grand prize of $10 million, and smaller prizes reaching millions of dollars, under House-passed legislation to encourage research into hydrogen as an alternative fuel.

[Story.] HT: Dave Reed.

The current issue of Nature reports on a study purporting to calculate the value of insects to the U.S. economy. A sampling of their "conclusions":

By far the greatest direct contribution of insects comes from their role as food for birds, game and fish, Losey and Vaughan calculate. Given the overall value to the US economy of the recreation industries of hunting, fishing and birdwatching, and the proportion of species involved that eat insects, these industries would be almost $50 billion worse off each year without them.

Insects also save farmers some $4.5 billion each year by gobbling up pests on dozens of different crops, and a cool $3 billion by pollinating many different fruits and vegetables. The humble dung beetle chips in with savings worth $380 million, by keeping cowpats out of the way of parasitic flies and saving valuable cattle from infections.

On the other hand, some of these same insects invade our homes, picnics, etc., thereby reducing their total value to the economy (unless we count purchases of Off! as enhancing value).

From the April 1, 1906 NYT (not a joke, as far as I can tell):

Every man his own wireless station with the aid of an umbrella, is the promise made yesterday by an officer of the American De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company...By the pocket wireless apparatus, it is declared, any one man can, with a knowledge of the Morse alphabet, telegraph from any point in New York City to Coney Island and possibly to distances further away, even to ships at sea. This apparatus might be ready in a few weeks, it was asserted.

I wonder who was the expected audience for such a contraption? If such a technology was the sole province of the very wealthy, would this have triggered fake portable telegraphs with which the mere mortals could pose (as was the case at one time with cell phones)?

Isn't it amazing how far we have come not only in the past ten years but in the past one hundred.

In hiking mountains it's not always the highest mountain that is best. Many of the Colorado 14ers are fairly unimpressive peaks simply because they rise only a couple thousand feet from the nearby ridge (or saddle) leading to the next peak.

So mountains end up being defined in terms of something called prominence more than height. There's quite an elaborate science behind determining a mountain's prominence.

Prominence is a term that represents the elevation of a summit relative to the surrounding terrain. It is defined as the elevation of a summit relative to the highest point to which one must descend before reascending to a higher summit.

Here's a list and map of the 57 "ultra" prominent peaks in the 48 states of the U.S. with prominences greater than 5000 feet.

I've hiked up one, 56 to go.

The static view of the world and the state of technology, which in turn would suggest that the price of oil will forever increase and we will all be riding llamas in a few years, would be funny if it wasn't so prevalent amongst those who are in control of my tax bill.

Many economists claim that we have little to worry about, and while in the short run things might become a little more or less expensive, in the long run I am also confident. Why? There are a lot of advancements and ingenious methods for capturing the wasted energy in the world, from speed bumps that depress (just a little) when a car d