Isegoria

Recent research shows rats, not men, to blame for death of Easter Island:

Almost all of the palm seed shells discovered on the island were found to have been gnawed by rats. Thousands of rat bones have been found, and crucially, much of the damage to forestry appears to have been done before evidence of fires on the island. Evidence from other Pacific islands also confirms how devastating rats can be.

Exactly how rats got on to the island is not known, although one theory is that they arrived as stowaways in the first canoes of Polynesian colonists. Once they arrived, the rats found palm nuts offered an almost unlimited high-quality food supply.

Under ideal conditions, rats reproduce so rapidly that their numbers double every 47 days; unchecked, a single mating pair can produce a population of nearly 17 million in just over three years. Research in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands shows that when available food is taken into account, populations can reach 75 to the acre.

“At 75 rats per acre, the rat population of Easter Island could have exceeded 3.1 million,” says the report. The Hawaiian research demonstrates that rats were capable, on their own, of deforesting large lowland coastal areas in about 200 years or less. “In the absence of effective predators, rats alone could eventually result in deforestation.”

Dr Hunt says the environmental catastrophe of Easter Island has been masked by speculation about the intentions of people cutting down the last tree: “Indeed, the last tree may simply have died. Rats may have simply eaten the last seeds.

(Hat tip to Todd.)

Leonardo Maugeri, author of The Age of Oil: The Mythology, History and Future of the World’s Most Controversial Resource, asks, What Lies Below?:

How much oil lies beneath the Earth’s crust? The only thing we know for sure is that history is littered with estimates so far off the mark — usually below the mark — that they border on the comical. In the 1920s, for instance, the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. (now BP) refused to take a stake in Saudi Arabia, thinking that the country didn’t hold a single drop of oil. In 1919, the U.S. Geological Survey predicted that the United States would run out of oil in nine years. Yet by the time nine years had passed, huge discoveries, topped by the Black Giant field in Texas, had created a massive oil glut that almost destroyed the industry. In the 1970s, the consensus turned grim again: oil production would peak in the mid-1980s and then drop precipitously. A famous CIA report predicted the “rapid exhaustion” of accessible fields, while President Jimmy Carter warned that oil wells were “drying up all over the world.” Instead, in 1986, oil prices collapsed in the midst of a huge supply boom, as they had done many times before.

One reason for the underestimates is that the technology for recovering oil keeps improving:

Today the average recovery rate for oil is about 35 percent of the estimated “oil in place,” which means that only 35 barrels out of 100 may be brought to the surface. And only a part of those 35 barrels is considered “proven reserves,” which means they are immediately available for production and commercialization. The role of technology is critical. Over the decades, technology has greatly expanded the quantity of oil that can be extracted — through the injection of water and natural gas as well as horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing and more. All this progress has boosted the average recovery rate, which was only around 20 percent as late as 30 years ago, and less than 15 percent 60 years ago. In the future, further gains are expected from technologies that are still in their infancy.

Simply put, new exploration methods have increased existing reserves over time, even without any new discoveries. The oil literature is full of examples. A most astonishing one is the Kern River field in California, discovered in 1899. In 1942 its “remaining” reserves were estimated at 54 million barrels. Yet from 1942 to 1986 it produced 736 million barrels, and still had another 970 million “remaining.” The one thing we can be certain about is that our knowledge of oil reserves is subject to constant revision, usually upward. That’s why, over the decades, all attempts to evaluate our planet’s oil endowment have proved too conservative, even when those estimates have included probabilistic assumptions about future discoveries and increases in recovery rates.

On the French version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, Qui veut gagner des millions?, a player was asked, What revolves around the earth?, and he wasn’t sure if it was the sun (le soleil) or the moon (la lune). So he used a lifeline and asked the audience:

This really happened on July 13, 2006, on the top French television channel, watched by millions of people, and it’s frightening.

Even if you speak no French, you should watch the video — and perhaps feel better about our American school system.

In an instant, retirement savings can vanish — and you may have no legal protection:

One moment Dave DeSmidt had $179,000 in his 401(k) retirement account, the next he had nothing. In an instant, 25 years of savings had disappeared.

With a few clicks, someone raided DeSmidt’s retirement account with J.P. Morgan & Co and ordered a full disbursement to a private checking account.

Then came the really bad news. While credit card and online banking accounts are legally protected in the event of fraud, DeSmidt’s brokerage account came with no such insurance. Two months after the theft, his balance still read $0.

Did Muhammad Really Say That? looks at the hadith, the stories surrounding Muhammad and the Koran:

Muhammad commanded followers not to record what he said to guard against the possibility that they would confuse his words with God’s. Instead, Muslims kept the sayings alive orally.

By the early 9th century, about 200 years after Muhammad’s death, as many as 700,000 sayings were circulating across the Muslim world. Many were of questionable credibility and some were even fabricated to support political or economic policies.

Leading scholars decided that the sayings should be collected and verified. Using a painstaking process, they traced the chain of narration and scrutinized the character and memory skills of the individual reporters.

The two preeminent hadith scholars, Muhammad ibn Isma’il al-Bukhari and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, collected 2,602 and 9,200 hadith, respectively, all of them considered sahih, or “sound,” authentic and indisputable. Other collections exist, but they include sayings with weak links or other defects.

Harold McGee is Trying to Clear Absinthe’s Reputation:

Today absinthe is legal again throughout Europe, and while it is still banned in this country, it is easy to buy over the Internet. Its reputation, however, remains as cloudy as the cocktails that are made with it. Some welcome clarification has now arrived in the form of a new study by a team of German chemists and physicians.

Absinthe is a distilled spirit flavored with a variety of herbs and spices, primarily wormwood, an aromatic, bitter shrub. The key constituent of wormwood is a chemical called thujone, which gives it — and absinthe — a penetrating evergreen aroma. (Thujone is also a major component of the herb sage.) Thujone and the other aromatic compounds are what cause absinthe to become milky when it’s diluted. The aromatics are more soluble in alcohol than in water, so when the concentrated spirit is cut with wine or water, they cluster together in tiny droplets that reflect light from their surfaces. Instantly, what was a clear liquid clouds over.

Absinthe became tremendously popular throughout Europe in the 19th century. It was blamed for causing hallucinations, mental instability and criminal behavior, which medical authorities attributed to thujone. This belief helped get absinthe banned. But according to the new study, by Dirk W. Lachenmeier and colleagues, the modern medical consensus is that absinthism was either simple alcohol poisoning — some absinthes were 70 percent alcohol, nearly double the strength of most distilled drinks — or caused by methanol and other toxic adulterants found in some cheap absinthes.

Thujone is true to its reputation in one respect: it does turn out to have unusual pharmacological properties. It interacts with several neurotransmitter systems in the brain, including one that is also activated by the cannabinoids in marijuana. But while absinthe will get you drunk, it won’t make you stoned. In one experiment, a dose of thujone equivalent to a pint of absinthe lowered the subjects’ performance on attention tests and made them more anxious. Very large doses are toxic, but moderate consumption appears to be safe.

But buyer beware: Europe currently has no regulations on how absinthe is made or what it can be made from. The German chemists think some rules are a good idea: some Czech brands they sampled were tinted turquoise, were flavored with mint instead of wormwood, tasted sweet instead of bitter and were so dilute that they didn’t grow cloudy when mixed with water.