Isegoria

Climbers clear mountain of garbage from Everest:

Climbers from Japan and Nepal picked up 500 kg (about 1,000 lbs) of tins, old tents, food and medicines littered on Mount Everest over decades by mountaineers, the climbers said on Monday.

Hundreds of climbers carrying tons of supplies try and climb the 8,850 meter (29,035 feet) Mount Everest every year, adding to the piles of trash on its slopes.
[...]
Noguchi had led several cleaning campaigns to the mountain in the past and has so far collected 8.8 metric tons of rubbish from the Nepali as well as the Tibetan side of Mount Everest.

Drinking farm milk may cut asthma risk:

Consumption of farm milk appears to reduce the risk of asthma and allergy, according to findings from a European study.

“All the children drinking unpasteurized farm milk and eating other farm-related dairy products showed the same level of protection against asthma and allergies, regardless of whether they were living on a farm or not,” lead author Dr. Marco Waser, from the University of Basel in Switzerland, said in a statement. The benefits were greatest when consumption of farm milk began during the first year of life, he added.

When I received an e-mail saying “This guy can do anything,” I didn’t know what to expect. Then I realized the linked article, Briton paraglides over Mt. Everest, was about Bear Grylls, host of Man vs. Wild:

Bear Grylls, 32, flew 140 meters (460 feet) above the world’s highest peak at 8,850 meters (29,035 feet) on Monday after taking off on a powered paraglider from a village in the Khumbhu region where Everest is located, Explore Himalaya agency said Friday.

“Bear” first made his name as a mountain climber:

Bear Grylls first entered the record books in 1997 by being the youngest Briton to summit Ama Dablam in the Himalayas, a peak famously described by Sir Edmund Hillary as ‘unclimbable’. Then one year later at only 23 years old Bear Grylls gained another record when he became the youngest Briton to climb Mount Everest and come down alive. Both these achievements are made even more remarkable by the fact that a mere two years earlier he almost severed his spinal cord in a near fatal parachuting accident in Africa.

“Growable” Homes Made With Mushrooms:

Insulation made with mushroom spores could eventually replace the familiar pink synthetic foam used by many homeowners to pad their attics and walls.

Although excellent insulators, traditional polystyrene and polyurethane foam blends require petroleum, are expensive to produce, and are not biodegradable.

The patented Greensulate formula is an organic, fire-retardant board made of water, flour, minerals and mushroom spores. It not only hinders heat flow but could also be modified to produce sustainable, “growable” homes.
[...]
The insulation starts with a slurry of water, biodegradable mineral particles called Pearlite (those white beads in potting soil), hydrogen peroxide and starch.

The mixture is poured into a panel-shaped mold and injected with living mushroom cells. As the cells grow, they digest the starch as food and begin sprouting thousands of cellular strands called mycelium. In nature, these strands act as roots, providing nutrients and structural support.

After a week or two, a three to six-inch panel of insulation is fully grown, consisting of the insulating particles of Pearlite suspended in a tightly meshed network of mycelium.

According to Bayer, the organic composite board has an insulating value similar to fiberglass, some foams, or loose-fill cellulose.

“Growable” Homes Made With Mushrooms:

Insulation made with mushroom spores could eventually replace the familiar pink synthetic foam used by many homeowners to pad their attics and walls.

Although excellent insulators, traditional polystyrene and polyurethane foam blends require petroleum, are expensive to produce, and are not biodegradable.

The patented Greensulate formula is an organic, fire-retardant board made of water, flour, minerals and mushroom spores. It not only hinders heat flow but could also be modified to produce sustainable, “growable” homes.
[...]
The insulation starts with a slurry of water, biodegradable mineral particles called Pearlite (those white beads in potting soil), hydrogen peroxide and starch.

The mixture is poured into a panel-shaped mold and injected with living mushroom cells. As the cells grow, they digest the starch as food and begin sprouting thousands of cellular strands called mycelium. In nature, these strands act as roots, providing nutrients and structural support.

After a week or two, a three to six-inch panel of insulation is fully grown, consisting of the insulating particles of Pearlite suspended in a tightly meshed network of mycelium.

According to Bayer, the organic composite board has an insulating value similar to fiberglass, some foams, or loose-fill cellulose.

Japanese freeters find shelter in cyber cafes:

Yamashita is one of Japan’s many “freeters” — a compound of “free” and “Arbeiter”, the German word for “worker”.

A by-product of the economic crisis that hit Japan and its lifelong employment guarantees in the 1990s, freeters drift between odd jobs.

Earning around 1,000 yen ($8) per hour, they often struggle to pay the rent in Tokyo, one of the most expensive cities in the world where a modest 30 square meter (320 square foot) flat in a central location can easily cost 150,000 yen ($1,250) a month.

Now the economy is recovering, but many freeters are missing out on the upswing after years of unskilled work. Most expanding companies prefer to recruit fresh university graduates or transfer basic jobs to low-wage countries such as China.

As an Internet cafe owner in Tokyo’s Ueno district, Masami Takahashi has had a close-up view of social change in Japan.

Around the corner from his cafe, homeless people who cannot even afford a reclining seat sleep in cardboard boxes.

Chinese prostitutes in Japanese kimonos prop up drunken office workers, or “salarymen”, who will stumble into Masami’s cafe for a nap later in the night.

The salarymen were the first to discover Internet cafes as a cheap alternative to hotels after companies hurt by the economic crisis stopped funding team drinks — an essential part of Japanese corporate culture — followed by a night in a hotel.

Freeter seemed like an odd word for the Japanese to use:

The word freeter or freeta was first used around 1987 or 1988 and is thought to be an amalgamation of the English word free (or perhaps freelance) and the German word Arbeiter (“worker”). (The German word Arbeit is commonly used as the Japanese loanword arubaito for “part-time job”.) It is said that the use was coined by the Japanese part time job magazine From A (Japanese: Furomu?). Other possible spellings are fur?t?, furiita, freeta, furiitaa, or furitaa in order of frequency

At any rate, I wouldn’t be inclined to mix “arbeit” and “free” without a strong sense of irony. Arbeit macht frei.

King Herod’s tomb possibly found:

This undated photo made available by the Israeli Government Press Office, Tuesday, May 8, 2007,The hilltop compound of Herodium is seen near the west Bank town of Hebron. An Israeli archaeologist has found the tomb of King Herod, the legendary builder of ancient Jerusalem and the Holy Land, at a hilltop compound south of the city, the Hebrew University announced.

Timothy Noah looks at speed reading in The 1,000-Word Dash:

Studies show that people who read at or above the college level all read at about the same speed when they read for pleasure.

Within the contentious world of reading theory, there is unanimity on this point. When you factor out the amount of time spent thinking through complex and unfamiliar concepts — a rarity when people read for pleasure — reading is an appallingly mechanical process. You look at a word or several words. This is called a “fixation,” and it takes about .25 seconds on average. You move your eye to the next word or group of words. This is called a “saccade,” and it takes up to about .1 seconds on average. After this is repeated once or twice, you pause to comprehend the phrase you just looked at. That takes roughly 0.3 to 0.5 seconds on average. Add all these fixations and saccades and comprehension pauses together and you end up with about 95 percent of all college-level readers reading between 200 and 400 words per minute, according to Keith Rayner, a psycholinguist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The majority of these college-level readers reads about 300 words per minute.

How quickly can you listen?

Books on tape also pose a time problem. Carver found that college-level readers optimally take in and understand spoken words at the same word rate that they take in written words — typically about 300 words per minute. The catch is that not even auctioneers can speak at a rate much beyond 250 words per minute. (To produce a 300-words-per-minute sample, Carter had to use a “time-compressed speech” device that compacts words and deletes fractions of dead air between words.) The 250-word count of an auctioneer is much faster than the 175 words per minute the typical book-on-tape actor manages.

In Faster Pussycat! Read! Read!, Daniel Akst notes that the secret to reading faster is … reading faster — which isn’t always easy.

King Herod’s tomb possibly found:

This undated photo made available by the Israeli Government Press Office, Tuesday, May 8, 2007,The hilltop compound of Herodium is seen near the west Bank town of Hebron. An Israeli archaeologist has found the tomb of King Herod, the legendary builder of ancient Jerusalem and the Holy Land, at a hilltop compound south of the city, the Hebrew University announced.

Timothy Noah looks at speed reading in The 1,000-Word Dash:

Studies show that people who read at or above the college level all read at about the same speed when they read for pleasure.

Within the contentious world of reading theory, there is unanimity on this point. When you factor out the amount of time spent thinking through complex and unfamiliar concepts — a rarity when people read for pleasure — reading is an appallingly mechanical process. You look at a word or several words. This is called a “fixation,” and it takes about .25 seconds on average. You move your eye to the next word or group of words. This is called a “saccade,” and it takes up to about .1 seconds on average. After this is repeated once or twice, you pause to comprehend the phrase you just looked at. That takes roughly 0.3 to 0.5 seconds on average. Add all these fixations and saccades and comprehension pauses together and you end up with about 95 percent of all college-level readers reading between 200 and 400 words per minute, according to Keith Rayner, a psycholinguist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The majority of these college-level readers reads about 300 words per minute.

How quickly can you listen?

Books on tape also pose a time problem. Carver found that college-level readers optimally take in and understand spoken words at the same word rate that they take in written words — typically about 300 words per minute. The catch is that not even auctioneers can speak at a rate much beyond 250 words per minute. (To produce a 300-words-per-minute sample, Carter had to use a “time-compressed speech” device that compacts words and deletes fractions of dead air between words.) The 250-word count of an auctioneer is much faster than the 175 words per minute the typical book-on-tape actor manages.

In Faster Pussycat! Read! Read!, Daniel Akst notes that the secret to reading faster is … reading faster — which isn’t always easy.

I love the whole notion of the Paleo-Future — or what used to seem futuristic.

In honor of cinco de mayo, I share this bit of margarita history:

The earliest citation for a Margarita Cocktail is the December 1953 issue of Esquire magazine:

Drink of the Month

She’s from Mexico, Senores, and her name is the Margarita Cocktail — and she is lovely to look at, exciting and provocative.

1 ounce tequila
Dash of Triple Sec
Juice of 1/2 lime or lemon

Pour over crushed ice, stir. Rub the rim of a stem glass with rind of lemon or lime, spin in salt — pour, and sip.

The modern recipe — or one of the common recipes — calls for tequila, cointreau, and fresh lime juice in a 3:2:1 ratio.

Salud!

Climate change hits Mars:

Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.

Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.

In You Are What You Grow, Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, notes that you can buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, where all the processed food is:

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

That’s because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

Definitely read the whole article.

In You Are What You Grow, Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, notes that you can buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, where all the processed food is:

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

That’s because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

Definitely read the whole article.