Isegoria

As Yahoo! News – And the Tallest Nationality Is… points out, the Dutch are the tallest nation on earth, with Dutch men averaging 6’1″:

The market research organization GfK said Thursday that data collected over the last seven years showed increasing demand for larger clothing sizes in the Netherlands, where the average man is about 185 cm (6 foot 1 inch) tall.

[...]

The Dutch are nearly 10 cm (four inches) taller on average than the British and Americans, and almost 15 cm (six inches) taller than they were four decades ago.

According to Napoleon ‘killed by his doctors’, researchers from the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Department are claiming that overzealous medical treatment finished off the former emperor:

He was given regular doses of antimony potassium tartrate, or tartar emetic a poisonous colourless salt which was used to make him vomit. He was also given regular enemas.

The researchers, led by forensic pathologist Steven Karch, say this would have caused a serious potassium deficiency, which can lead to a potentially fatal heart condition called Torsades de Pointes in which rapid heartbeats disrupt blood flow to the brain.

They say the final straw is likely to have been a 600 milligram dose of mercuric chloride, given as a purge to clear the intestines two days before his death.

This was five times the normal dose, and would have depleted his potassium levels still further, they say.

Of course, Napoleon was probably already on his way out from stomach cancer. (Hat tip to Mercola’s Health Blog.)

WSJ.com – The Daily Fix explains that Mark Welch of the Sydney Morning Herald has ridden Huez, the route through the Alps that Lance Armstrong is riding in the Tour de France, and “lived to tell about it — barely.” Here’s what he had to say about it:

‘By the time I had reached the second of 21 hairpins, I felt as if Saverio Rocca was sitting on my chest and Anthony Rocca was on the handlebars.’

What other American newspaper would cite an Australian journalist’s reference to two Aussie-rules footballers while describing a bicycle race?

Deadly Quests: Three Books Recount Perils of Exploration reviews Great Heart, Down the Great Unknown, and Cooper’s Creek, three books where “the cost of expanding human horizons was death”:

Short of traveling to another planet, no one alive today can truly comprehend what it meant to be an explorer a century ago.

As late as 1860, parts of every continent remained blank on the world’s maps. Aside from widely scattered indigenous clans, most people avoided these harsh wildernesses like the plague: An accident, a misjudgment, the merest slip of a foot meant certain death.

To other men and women, however, uncharted territory was like a red cape to a bull. To plant the first non-native foot in terra incognita was considered a feat akin to winning a war. The difficult part was surviving to tell the tale.

You don’t have to be that far from civilization for even a twisted ankle to mean starvation and death.

I love this description of Australia:

By the mid-19th century, the coastline of Australia had been charted from the sea, but the continent’s interior was a “ghastly blank,” writes Alan Moorehead in “Cooper’s Creek.” The vast terrain had rebuffed numerous attempts to traverse it. It was a geography of violent extremes, where temperatures could rise to 157 degrees in the sun, and neither shade nor shelter could be found for hundreds of miles. Yet its very inaccessibility persuaded people that it must harbor gold mines, fertile farmland or an inland sea.

Caffeine is a fascinating drug. From Coffee Impairs Short-Term Memory:

The study divided 32 college students into two groups. One group was given 200mg of caffeine, which is equivalent to two strong cups of coffee, and the other was given a dummy drug. The students were then asked to answer 100 general knowledge questions that had simple, one-word answers.

Caffeine aided word recall when the words were similar to the answer. But when the words were unrelated to the answer, the students who had taken caffeine had more trouble recalling the answer than those who had taken the placebo.

Fast Company’s The Anarchist’s Cookbook has little to do with the underground book of the same name; it’s about John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market:

Mackey is a persistently puzzling fellow: self-effacing, but with a hint that he senses his own legacy. During 2002, in the heart of the recession, he took four months off to hike the Appalachian Trail, fulfilling a longtime dream.

People who hike the whole trail end up with ‘trail names,’ a moniker that acknowledges that the Appalachian Trail is a universe unto itself, a place where the roles of the outside world are set aside. Mackey had been warned in advance to pick his own trail name, lest he be tagged with something derisive, as is the custom.

‘My trail name is Strider,’ he says. For someone tall, lanky, and energetic, it seems an innocuous enough choice. ‘I’m a great admirer of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings ,’ Mackey says. ‘Before I was in high school, I had read it five times. And one of the characters I admired was Strider.’

But as with much about Mackey, that nickname is not quite what it seems. ‘Strider isn’t his real name; it’s his nickname on the trail. He is really Aragorn, the king. But he wasn’t a king on the trail. In 2002, when I was hiking, I was certainly the richest guy hiking the Appalachian Trail. I was a kind of secret king. But that wasn’t my identity, or my role, on the trail.’