After the Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday in the healthcare case upholding the individual mandate tax, reporters — apparently devoid of any modern technology capable of transmitting information at the speed of light — were forced to deliver the news 18th century-style, at the speed of their feet. NPR has a few funny photos of reporters dashing off to inform the public.
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images via NPR
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images via NPR
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images via NPR
Mark Wilson/Getty Images via NPR
Bloomberg apparently won the race, as they were the first to report the decision correctly — CNN and Fox News both initially reported that the mandate was struck down, apparently because they stopped reading on page 2 of the ruling; this resulted in someone making the parody below, of the infamous 1948 election photo of Truman holding The Chicago Tribune, which wrongly reported that Dewy defeated him. Bloomberg beat Reuters and AP by only a few seconds, most likely because they have an association with SCOTUSblog, whose tight operation probably helped improve their speed.
Truman, holding the paper, in reality defeated Dewey
A new outfit called AsapSCIENCE made an interesting video (below) explaining, along with scientific reasons, various things you can do around a night of heavy drinking that will lessen the pain the next day:
Eat fatty foods and carbs before you embark on your binge: you’ll get less drunk
Drink water — lots of it, throughout the night: alcohol causes dehydration, which causes headaches
Stick to light colored liquors and wines: not because you’re racist, but because the darker ones have more toxins that make you feel bad
Avoid carbonation: fizzy liquids help your body absorb alcohol quicker
Take an aspirin before going to bed: it inhibits the creation of a hangover-causing chemical. But don’t take Tylenol — that’ll make your hangover worse.
For breakfast, eat eggs, a banana and fruit juice: all of these contain stuff that will make you feel better
Avoid being a woman, Asian, or both: both tend to weigh less, have less body water and less of the enzyme that breaks down alcohol, so they can’t drink as much before the badness kicks in.
Last year, we saw a very interesting article explaining why you should quit your gym. It focused on how gyms are there to make money, not to make you fit, and therefore they deal in neophilia (new machines and workouts) and in getting you to spend as little time in the gym, crowding their machines, as possible. And it also said that gyms are pretty unnecessary, because you only really need to do four types of exercises:
These exercises work every major muscle group, but unlike the machines in the gym which isolate them, they also work the secondary, stabilizer muscles which prevent injury. In the same vein, the New York Times is now saying that everyone should be lifting weights — not just doing cardio like running and cycling — because besides being a good way to burn calories and prevent injury, weight training is also necessary to avoid the feebleness of old age. And if you only do one weight training exercise, it should be the squat.
The squat works almost every major muscle group and is the motion that people have trouble with when they get older: getting up. It can be done with a barbell, as shown above, or with regular dumbells, or with no weight at all (your arms crossed, or held straight out in front). In the video in the article, an expert explains how with weight training, heavy weights aren’t necessary as long as the muscle gets fatigued. It’s faster to get the muscle sore with heavy weights, but if you can do it by lifting lighter weights for longer, then you’ll get stronger either way.
In general, the expert — he’s Canadian, yet appears smart — says that cardio is a good exercise, but weights will help not only with strength, but also with the efficiency of the exercise. So even distance runners and cyclists will also benefit from weight training.
On his late night show, Jimmy Kimmel started doing a new segment in which he hooks up a small kid to a fake lie detector — the kid obviously thinking it’s real — and then he gets the kid to admit to doing all kinds of things which range from true to ludicrous: admitting to swearing, insisting on prior moon travel and just saying whatever Jimmy Kimmel wanted. So far, there have been two segments, and both are hilarious.
The USDA has a webpage which explains what the four different types of expiration dates mean; from the page:
A “Sell-By” date tells the store how long to display the product for sale. You should buy the product before the date expires.
A “Best if Used By (or Before)” date is recommended for best flavor or quality. It is not a purchase or safety date.
A “Use-By” date is the last date recommended for the use of the product while at peak quality. The date has been determined by the manufacturer of the product.
“Closed or coded dates” are packing numbers for use by the manufacturer.
The page goes on to say that even for the use-by date, “a product should be safe, wholesome and of good quality if handled properly and kept at 40°F or below.” Things that have been continuously frozen are safe indefinitely. Otherwise, the USDA recommends to eat it by the use-by date, if the package has one, just because it’ll taste better, if nothing else. The safety issues come into play mainly when food is improperly handled, even if it’s before the use-by date. Improper handling can include leaving food out for several hours, thawing for more than two hours, contaminating it with something or being handled by filthy people. Foods should also pass the smell and look test: if it smells or looks funny, even if it’s not unsafe, it’s at least past its prime as far as quality goes.
For sell-by dates, on the other hand, the USDA provides a couple of charts (below) which indicate that uncooked poultry and processed meats can be kept for a day or two after bringing them home (regardless of the sell-by date), other uncooked meats for 3 to 5 days, cured ham for up to a week and eggs for up to 5 weeks. (It also goes into some detail on eggs with the USDA shield, which are stamped with the day of the year they were packed — 001 for January 1st, 179 for June 27, 365 for December 31st — and have to be sold 45 days after that. A calculator which converts dates into the day of the year is available at mistupid.com. Eggs should also be kept in the coldest part of the fridge, not the door.) Cooked meats that have been processed and packed at a plant can be kept for quite a while longer: at least a few days in the package, then another few days after opening.
Easter Island (whose native name is Rapa Nui) in the South Pacific is generally seen as an example of the Tragedy of the Commons: inhabitants selfishly depleted the island’s shared natural resources, leading to their own eventual doom. Settlers arrived there in 800 A.D. and found a lush island filled with forests, then over the next thousand years proceeded to cut the trees down and make canoes for fishing, houses for living, and tools for farming. But they didn’t realize how fragile the ecosystem on the island was, and that the trees, once cut, would be very difficult to grow back. After several centuries, there were virtually no trees on the island, and since it’s one of the most isolated places on earth and was therefore devoid of trade, this meant there were no more canoes, houses or farming tools. And even if there were, without protection from the trees, fierce winds eroded the soil so much that farming was next to impossible. Eventually, lack of food and the resulting violence decimated the population.
Ahu Tongariki near Rano Raraku, a 15-moai ahu excavated and restored in the 1990s
Dutch explorers discovered the island on Easter Sunday (hence its Western name) in 1622, about 75 years after the last forests had disappeared; they described the island as having rich soil and being cultivated, and of course having a shore lined with giant statues. Roughly 50 years later, Spanish explorers found it and also mentioned the statues, but said the land was largely uncultivated. Four years after that, James Cook said the soil was poor and the statues neglected, with some having fallen down. In 1786, French explorers reported only 10% of the island was cultivated and finally, in 1825, a British ship reported no standing statues.
The prevalent theory is that the impressive statues, which were central to the Rapa Nui religion, had all been toppled in a quick 50 years — after having watched over the shore for centuries — because the islanders didn’t think to protect the environment they all shared. The fact is that the island was slowly deforested, which led to soil erosion and a lack of fishing canoes, which led to a lack of food, which led to civil war and eventually cannibalism. By 1877, thanks to additional deaths from genocide committed by slave traders in the 1860s and the smallpox introduced by them, the island’s population was down to 111 people — from about 3,000 when it was first discovered by Europeans, and probably around 10,000 a few decades before that. In 1888, it was annexed by Chile (the closest large country) as a result of a treaty with the remaining natives. The tragedy is told in a 2006 book called Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed.
Statues on Easter Island in various states of restoration in 2004. Photo by Phillie Casablanca.
But recently, a couple of archaeologists have threaded a different story through those same facts and published it in a book called The Statues That Walked: Unraveling The Mystery of Easter Island. Their theory is that the original Polynesian settlers of the island arrived in 1200 A.D., (400 years after the generally accepted date) and purposely brought rats with them on their canoes along with chickens, in order to eat them. Once on the island, however, without any natural predators, the rats flourished on their own and ate the nuts of the now-extinct and slow-growing Easter Island palm tree, thereby preventing their reseeding. And so the trees were decimated due to rats brought by the settlers, not directly by the settlers’ hands. Even so, they figured out ways around soil erosion: stone enclosures were built around farms to protect them from winds, and the soil was enriched with volcanic gravel. They practiced population control and generally lived a sustainable existence until the Europeans came, who introduced new diseases and new status symbols aside from the giant statues. Eventually, the Rapa Nui started dying en masse and stopped caring about the statues, which subsequently fell into disrepair. These archaeologists also believe that obsidian weapons that have been discovered were actually farming tools, and that there was no civil war.
Location of Easter Island
One other difference in their theory: how the statues got to the shore from the dormant volcano where they were made, miles away. (Statues at various stages of completion have been found in a quarry in the volcano and on the route from there to the beach.) Mainstream thinking is that the statues were made at the quarry, then rolled on logs to the shore. But while the authors of the alternative theory don’t believe oral tradition about violence and cannibalism, they do believe the tradition which says the statues walked to the shore. And what’s more, it may actually be true: in a video of experiments funded by National Geographic, it’s clear that a very large and heavy statue can be made to walk with a few strong ropes and three groups of people pulling it from one side and the other. The secret: the statues’ giant heads and potbelly design makes them heavy in the front, giving them forward momentum and allowing the islanders to use gravity to help propel the statue forward.
