Incandescent Imbecility

May I suggest that the people who are stockpiling incandescent bulbs might just be flaming idiots?  Just a thought...  I've used CFLs since they first came out and cost $25 apiece, and while the light was a lot "fluorescent office lighting" back then, they have now gotten to the point where I and my guests can't tell which fixture has the incandescent, which has the halogen, and which has the CFL bulb.

To explain that - I have a reading lamp with a 60W incandescent in it, a second reading lamp with a halogen, a bathroom with a halogen, and everything else is CFL.  Almost invariably, they say the halogen reading light is too "cold" while the halogen in the bathroom is fine, and no-one has ever suggested that the light bulbs in the lounge or kitchen are wrong or give poor light.

For all you people who are going to mutter about "newfangled mumbletty mutter crap not like the good ole days" well guess what the good ole days are gone, behind us, and there's a new reality to contend with and it doesn't include your concerns that your light bulbs are messing with your sense of interior decorating.  If you really DO have such extreme colour acuity that you can tell the difference, change your effing precious decor to match the new lights.  

Do you know how many rooms had to be refurbished when the "good old oil and gas lights" gave way to those same electric incandescent lights that you're now clutching to your bosoms?  Get used to change cos there's gonna be a helluvva lot of change in the next few years, much of it down to your love of those incandescent bulbs and flawless decor...

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We're About To Find Out

. . . what "knife-edge" means . . .

UPDATE: Still more bad news . . .

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See If This Amuses

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Four Year Anniversary

I just realised - four years and a day ago:

Anniversary poor biopsy results 2005

2009-08-22

That's how long ago I had my biopsy results back, with their bleak outlook of almost 70% dysplasic cells in the samples.

I might bother to have another PSA sometime soon, but in all truth, I am still following my diet and don't feel that I have a single worry.

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The Real Solution For Global Warming

... is simple.  Don't expect quite so much convenience, expect to have to do a bit more for the daily bread.

Some friendly things you can do right now to do your part:

• Buy a lot more unprocessed raw food locally, and prepare and cook it yourself. It isn't going to be as much of a range of foods as you're used to, but it will definitely make a difference.
  Also, many people who buy processed food buy the same thing over and over anyway.  Why not swap it for something local, homegrown, and homecooked? There's definitely a time problem if you have long workdays, but those long workdays are generally NOT helping the ecosystem, whereas looking after yourself does help.  Paradox, huh?
• Plan shorter single-car mileages per week.  The train/bus commute may not be as comfortable, but it IS better than doing all those miles in a car by yourself or carpooling with two other people instead of with (as in a bus) 90 people.
  I'm all in favour of inner-city and high traffic density areas becoming Electric-Vehicle-Only areas, with petrol and diesel fuelled vehicle drivers having to pay a daily fee in order to drive in such zones.  Fossil fuelled vehicles are not an option in densely trafficked areas.
• Try to grow some of your food yourself, using minimal processed fertilisers or soil conditioners.
  That way you know what is in that food, beyond a doubt. Secondly, if you stick to natural soil fertilising and conditioning, you avoid much of the fertiliser pollution which plagues agricultural areas.  Monoculture (growing large areas of the same variety) is the single biggest cause of outbreaks of pests that feed on that variety, and that in turn is the single biggest reason factory farms have to use so much pesticide.
• Try bringing up a few rabbits or chickens for the table.
  Our diets require a certain amount of meat, but nowhere near as much as we do eat.  And nothing - no amount of photos of piles of shrink-wrapped packages of the meat you consume every year - nothing at all, brings home the message of what meat really costs to produce in the way that raising, feeding, slaughtering, and then preparing your own meat animals does...  I don't want to turn people vegetarian, but I do want to point out that farming many animals in a monoculture creates the same problems as with food crops, of needing strong chemical means to get rid of the pests that converge and become a plague.

Those are four things you could start doing right now.  They won't alleviate the food crisis, but they will mitigate the effects of overfarming.  They won't remove vehicle emissions from the equation, but they will make a difference.  Taken individually, each one seems like a tiny drop in a huge ocean - but that's how the ill effects have all crept in, one tiny insignificant seeming drop at a time...

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The Real Reason For Global Warming

I can see how perhaps young people can't quite see what grunt work has to do with conservation. And I can also see that yes, they are worried by the Global Warming phenomenon because they will be the ones most affected by it.  Now comes the bit where I'm so so so sorry to have to say...

But right now, convenience, laziness, and shortcuts are what is causing all that ecosystem change.  Our desire for everyone to "have it easy" is what drives factory farming, deforestation, "convenience" stores (that name says it all really) and mountain ranges' worth of garbage and pollution.  It's everyone all over the world trying to dump personal responsibility in exchange for a mysterious shadowy vague "them" to blame it on and who will do the hard work.

And sorry to say, it's not going to go away if that's the attitude people are going to have.  Unless you're prepared to forego that "eco-friendly holiday" that's so conveniently mentioned online for you and which you'll only spend a few hundred tons of carbon and emissions on just from going to and coming back from, you aren't really doing the planet any favours.  Are you conveniently getting all your grocery needs at a giant supermarket chain?  Then if you are, no amount of "ecofriendly!" and "healthy!" signage made from rapidly shrinking supplies of natural resources are actually going to make any of what you buy eco-friendly.

No amount of telling yourself that "X-Mart is just going to have to do a cleaner job" will reduce the impact of that nice clean packaging made from 1000 year half-life plastics, nor will it take back one gram of the pollution spewed into the air to produce that food and ship it halfway around the world from a place where it's cheap, and it won't take away one milligram of the pesticides used to grow that food and which is now in some waterway killing local animals.

And why are those supermarkets still doing that?  Because YOU are letting them, and you're giving them a mandate to keep doing it by continuing to give them your money.  If YOU could be arsed to find local farmer's markets and prepare meals instead of defrosting them, if YOU had a shred of responsibility instead of blaming the supermarket chain, this wouldn't be happening.  Think about that when you're next asked to volunteer to clean up roadside trash or participate in a tree planting and make some weak excuse and go on an eco-holiday instead... 

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This Will Be Their Testament?

How sad. It's because of dickheads like these that we'll finish up with more heatwaves, more bushfires, more extinctions, less fresh water, and ultimately worse living conditions.  Who voted for these morons?  More importantly, who's going to vote for them next time?

If these people are doing this out of some misguided sense that they are saving us money, well guess what senators and parliamentarians and other halfwits, I can't eat our crap plastic money, but I will be really really really pissed off when food costs me all of my scrimped and saved plastic money that you worked so studiously to save for me...

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Cash For Clunkers Ripped Off

UPDATE: at least there's one other person thinking like me.  and a good high profile one, at that.

While Cash For Clunkers is at its heart seemingly a good program, it does have some drawbacks.  As in this little gem of a scheme in Germany, where the cars are just sold again later.  NOT the best outcome.  It would be good if the car dealers there grew a conscience and just injected those engines as well, but my bet is that half of them ARE the element that's turning a profit by reselling those old shit-heaps.

It's not a well-thought-out scheme to begin with, because it brings as many problems as it solves.  And the one problem it does solve best isn't pollution but a kickstart to the economy that was guttering and dying in the USA.  For that, the CfC scheme has been a Godsend, because it gets money out there and circulating again.

Problems it didn't solve:

• Pollution.  As in the example of Germany, where it just moves the heaps around to spew somewhere else, in the States it just gets people to buy another pollution-spewer.  
• Transport.  The people who can afford to upgrade their car, whether by trading in, CfC, or whatever else, already have a car.  People who don't have the wherewithal to afford a car, are still just as screwed as before.

Much better would have been to have two wrinkles on the scheme:

• CfC only available for anyone purchasing an electric, hydrogen, or hybrid car with the rebate.  That would have solved the problem of pollution, and put incentive dollars in the pockets of those that most need them, the clean vehicle industry.
• Clunkers that are in roadworthy condition to have the engine removed and killed, and a new more efficient and clean engine fitted and then allowed to be resold - but only to individual customers, and at a price no more than the rebate plus the market cost of the engine and fitting.  That would provide cheap cars for those who need them but can't afford them, be they in the States or elsewhere in the world.

Used together those two steps would have solved a lot of hassles and also pulled the sting of the scam being perpetrated in Germany.

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Fetchez La Fishing Rod!

Isn't it amazing how the world comes back if you only let it?

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Just A Quick Observation On Weight Loss

I don't know how many TV news articles start with "Losing the weight is only half the story, here's the part that no-one else tells you."

The day one TV station headed an article with that tag, wasn't that the end of it?  Cos after that, everyone is telling you the part that "no-one else tells you" and in fact they need to change the tag to "... here's the part that everyone else has already told you."  Uh, yeah sure it lacks zing, but it's the truth... 

And the only bit I'm sure of is that losing weight IS the battle, just that you have to keep doing it.  %)  The word "diet" means "what you eat" and so to me a "weight loss diet" is equivalent to "what you eat to lose weight."  And there's no time limit on that.  You eat to lose weight, and you keep doing it.

That's the secret to losing the weight, I think.  Once you've found your way to lose weight, make sure it's something you'll be comfortable with for the rest of your life, and then keep doing it.

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Permaculture Tips

As you know, I like doing things that are closer to nature, things like gardening with less fertiliser and less soil preparation - stuff that reads a lot like permaculture, in fact.  I've been experimenting with my vegetable garden here, and in previous places I've lived, and come up with a few thoughts:

Huegelkultur:  Translates from German as "moundculture" and as you can see from this article it's pretty much just that - pile up biomass and pile a mound of soil over it.  I'm Austrian, like the guy Sepp mentioned in that article, and I'm an admirer of doing things in a low-impact low-footprint way.  But I'm not so sure.

• One: raised beds are anathema to permaculture.  They are a way of taking the land's natural lay - and then altering it.  But I do agree that raised beds are better, just please don't call them permaculture.  
• Two: It's a bit ironic to use a tractor to do all this while burning a shitload of fossil fuel and causing pollution.  
• Three: Where did the dirt for the mound come from?  You probably need more than comes out of the ditch, and in fact all the pics I've seen show the logs piled on the ground, and then some "dirt ex machina" appears to cover the logs up.  
• Four: The claim is that the rotting trees cause "natural tillage" by leaving air pockets that you'd otherwise have to plough.  But maybe the superior tillage also has to do with the fact that you dug up a mound of dirt, stuck some logs down, then piled the soil on.  In that process, you've given the soil a "superploughing" to considerable depth. 

Personally, I'd dig a trench, put the biomass in, and then pile the soil back on top, for the same effect.  Oh guess what? I already do that.  I take stuff that's too big to compost or feed to the worms, and dig holes in the garden and bury it.  My grandfather did that, and so did my parents. It's nothing new Sepperl, it's what we've been doing for generations.  

My method uses up all sorts of waste that would otherwise just rot in some midden somewhere.  And I don['t know either why it doesn't create a nitrogen deficient area of soil, but that perhaps comes from the other bits I do which aren't mentioned in the article and perhaps aren't being done.

Another problem in Australia is that summers get too hot to allow plants to be without a source of water, or you lose in one record heat day what took you three months to grow.  Just not worth it to have such deeply-held permaculture convictions.  And the same heat kills off worm farms unless you keep them under a wet blanket (there goes your brownie points for not wasting water) and turns what might have been promising compost into dry water-repelling dust.

Here's the things I've always done in my gardens and which improve any soil.

• DO dig your beds from time to time.  As I said, kitchen scraps, branches, leaves, feathers and bones and skins, all go to the garbage pit under garden bed "F" or wherever I'm currently burying.
• DO fertilise and condition the topsoil and subsoil layers.  Just not with chemicals.  I have compost that I wrap in old carpet pieces in the winter to keep them a bit warm, I have straw and hay and poo from the rabbits and the chickens, and I have worm tea and the leftover worm castings from worm farming.  These need to be dug into the garden bed and that tends to raise the bed enough, and probably encourages nitrogen fixation, water retention, and filters down decay bacteria to the stuff buried lower down.
• While I'm at it.  My excrement is no good in that particular situation, although rabbit chicken goat sheep cow horse and pig poop are okay.  We humans tend to concentrate too many toxins and bacteria that will just turn around and bite us, so our excrement needs to go lay in a trench somewhere dark for a year to decompose further, and then you can dig it under.  
• Urine?  Yes please!  Nothing more satisfying than going out and getting that wee among the veges.  Our urine is sterile, generally, and contains great trace nutrients including some that help in the fixing of nitrogen, thus solving the nitrogen-consuming decomposition problem.
• Hair. I've taken to sweeping up at hairdressers and bringing that to the garden.  Hair contains even more material that breaks down and provides growth factors.  You can dig it into the top/subsoil layers along with the upper material, in among the biomass lower down, or feed it to the worms, in particular, who will find it very filling and tasty.

I also have my garden beds laid out to a width that's the same as the rabbit hutches and chicken runs.  And those have wheels...  I can wheel a hutch full of rabbits over a garden bed and their wastes drop directly onto the topsoil, their urine contains more calcium than an application of lime, the scraps of oaten and lucerne hay form a mulch on the surface to keep moisture in and insulate the soils from the heat.  Two or three initial hand waterings washes the organic waste down into the soil where you want it, and if you were smart you ran poly drip tube in rows so you can now have the advantage of buried drip irrigation.

That 's how I started here last year, but I had to use bought potting mix.  This year, I've gathered all the composted and compostable materials, have a worm farm in production, and got a long job ahead of me digging over a few dozen meters of garden...  But it will produce a top crop this summer.

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Organic Food Is Crap

There has to be something to be taken from this article.  What exactly that something is, though, I couldn't tell you.  It seems to be what one famous surgeon delights in calling "woo," though.  It's a study commissioned to establish some results about organic food.

The result is that "organic food is no better than factory-farm-grown."  The British Food Standards Agency has made a "ruling" to that effect, based on this research.  That is heavy-handed and smacks of bulldozing.  A little.  But let's check a bit deeper, there might be something in this after all.

The study is of course conducted by the very best organisation to do it, a body whose skills in nutritional studies, knowledge of industrial toxins, and skill with biochemistry is unrivalled in the world today, it's the...  hold on, what the hell?  - the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.   What. The. Fuck.

Horses for courses people, and if scientists were horses and the field of nutrition was the trots, that school would be the one circling the glue factory with sleds made of house bricks.  Scientists are the ones always insisting on the right qualifications, and a school of hygiene is not a school of nutrition specialists no matter how you try and spin doctor it.

So what resources are they drawing on?  Oh good, they have the "analysis of 50 years of research into organic food" to draw on.  Which were apparently done at a rate of a thousand studies a year, because the article states that number a bit further on, 50,000 studies were analysed according to the reporter.  Uh, hang on.  BBBZZZZZZZTTTTTT!!!!  Nope, sorry.  Scratch that. Bad reporter, writing things the wrong way and creating a false impression. 

The unqualified researchers didn't actually analyse 50,000 study results, they carefully selected 55 - yes, a whole 55 - of those study results.  The rest apparently "didn't meet the researchers' criteria" whatever that means.  Oh yes, that's a way of saying "the rest didn't demonstrate what we were setting out to demonstrate..."

So.  A body that is not really all that qualified to conduct a nutrition study, carefully selects 0.1% of results out of 50 years of nutritional research, and presents its "findings" to the FSA on the basis of those.

I find it soooo helpful to turn this around, because it will help you to focus on what's relevant here - it's not that they carefully researched 0.1% of all the food studies done in the UK in 50 years, it's more a case of that their findings aren't fully supported by 99.9% of the studies done over fifty years...

And okay - I know that it's not actually unsupported by 99.9% of studies, but even if the study results were completely random, you'd expect that 50% would be favourable and 50% unfavourable.  To only find one tenth of one percent of study results to be suitable for your research indicates a very narrow focus of the research, and possibly a very specific guideline to preselect for the results you want to have come out of it.

Look.  I'm not going to research the researchers, or how they researched, or what their criteria were.  I can only say that it not only appears to be a carefully crafted study and result, but also that it flies in the face of everything that we know as commonsense.  A food produced naturally is natural, and is nutritively what our bodies have evolved to digest.  A food produced with the aid of chemical and physical processes will not be natural, and who knows - especially not a school of hygienists - how well tolerated it will be by our bodies?  There are thousands of ways to hook together carbon hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and just counting them as "nutrients" is not good enough.  After all, hook them together one way and you get oil, another way and you get alcohol.  VERY different effects on our bodies...

Our scientists are always asking us to beware of bullshit, and keep in mind that if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is too good to be true.  Unless it's their bullshit, and they're the ones saying that you can take their shortcuts and still come out with a miraculously indistinguishable product at the end of it.

And let me ask you, if it came down to it, does it change your buying habits?  Not mine.  I will always prefer food I've grown myself or food I've seen grown locally and without much processing, to what's on the shelves in the local supermarkets.  I'll always prefer free range and barn eggs and chickens to chicken factory product, and in fact I prefer my own chickens and their eggs to either of those.

Having just finished watching several nights of news articles about food processors cheating and defrauding us by adding water and bulking agents, cosmetically altering foods with various chemicals to make them more appealing when they're past their storage date, ripping off growers by storing foods for sometimes years, and underweighing, overpricing, and price fixing, I can safely say that I feel better about giving double the money to an organic grower and receiving honest produce than I would if I was saving half that amount but getting months-old food from a multinational giant corporation that's probably about 5% responsible for the global weather crisis due to their disregard for anything except profit.

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Proved Right Again, By Research.

UPDATE:
Here's another article pointing to inflammation as a cause of illness, but this time mental illness. And I don't mean in a roundabout namby-pamby indirect way, either.  This is BAM! direct.  Read the article.

I am always so goddam proud when science backs up my hypotheses.  I mentioned briefly in The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook that I figured that a lot of the damage to our bodies is caused by cellular inflammatory disorders of one kind or another, and here's one that's now being laid right on that very doorstep.

I've had this inkling you see, from reading lots online, that oxidants and other irritants cause inflammation at the cellular level.  These irritants include many of the food additives that are put into our processed foods.  makes sense doesn't it?  An ingredient meant to irritate minced beef into retaining its red colour has got to also irritate your body when you ingest it.  We're made of damn meat...

When the cells are inflamed, there's an increase in "noise" which makes the signals the cells are supposed to react to, harder for the cells to detect.  You can drown out a quite sensible and loud conversation with around half the sound power of white noise, very effectively.  And cells are much simpler things than we are, they can't adapt their sensing to a noisier environment.  So they start no longer seeing the signals that are meant to regulate them.

One of the signals that gets drowned out is the sugar/insulin signal.  Imagine dabbing peroxide bleach on a spot over and over, several times a day, for several years.  Do you reckon you might have a rew raw patch in that spot?  Hell yeah!  Would you do that to yourself/  Probably not.  Yet millions of people every day consume white sugar that has been bleached white with far unfriendlier substances than peroxide...

Here's the real kicker, as far as I'm concerned - when your body gets a free source of carbs such as white sugar, guess where that goes?  Yep, right to storage in your body fat...

I know that the "respected medical and scientific comunity" out there will holler about woo, they'll decline to study something so wild and unfounded, because dammit there's a way to do things and having idea from the laiety is not the way!  Which is a great pity because in the meanwhile people will in increasing numbers die of diabetes, of cancers, and immune diseases while someone somewhere one day decides to put in process the 'porper way" to "do science" and by then it'll be too late for several million souls.

I'm going to bold this.  If you take home one lesson from this article, let it be this:


Food from large food manufacturers, even and especially the "healthy alternative" ones, are pumped out in more kilotons than fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and produced as cheaply as possible, and they aren't formulated to be 100% safe, they are formulated not to spoil and thus cost the manufacturer returns.  

Lastly, remember what I said about the inflammation in cells causing mis-signalling, and then you have to realise that we're actually built around a very complex feedback network of very small signals.  If you want a demonstration of that, just mess your microscopic signals up with a really good getting drunk and subsequent hangover, then imagine if the drunk and the hangover was to last a lifetime...

Cancer cells are similarly miscommunicating about where growth ought to stop...

And we should be communicatiing VERY clearly with food manufacturers who put into their foods additives which are banned across whole continents just so they can stretch a product to make a few tenths of a cent per gram, or to last longer on the shelves so they can ship it farther and cover more markets with it.

In the meantime I'm just going to say to you to avoid white sugar, white bread, overly white salt, the additives that start with an E on most foodstuff in supermarkets, and too much animal fat, because just like us, they concentrate their poisons and irritants that are in their foods, in the fat and organs first.

That happens with us too, of course.  Fatty liver from eating too much inflamed fat which then has to be gall-dissolved and filtered, leaving all the adulterated fat nodules behind to form the liver-kiling specks.  Kidneys failing from trying to pass poisons that are designed to irritate meat, which the kidney is made out of.  And bowels and colons that spend most of their lives in contact with a colour / irritant made from a crushed insect that uses that irritant as a weapon, suddenly developing the cancer that the weapon grade irritant was supposed to cause...

The second take-home from this article is - your body has a remarkable amount of capacity to recover.  If you give it a chance.  Stop eating production line white bread, switch your white sugar for raw sugar, avoid any processed item that has more numerical ingredients than real ones, eat clean fresh vegetables that are in season (but there are exceptions, see my book) and remember that if you remove the irritation source, that will make a huge difference.  If you also learn how to deal with ALL the natural foods our bodies have evolved to, then your body is right in its comfort zone and will function at its most efficient - and you'll get that in health and energy.  

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The Final Solution Could Be...

Almost everyone who stops to think about it knows of at least one environmental impact that they, their lifestyle choices, or their life requirements, make on the Earth.  Go on, ask yourself, ask anyone.  "Yeah I know I shouldn't drive to the shop when I could cycle or walk but..."  or "I know I should walk and save the waste of resources on a 10-speed titanium framed bike but..." and so forth.

It's pretty obvious that just by being alive, we have an impact on the earth.  "If I hadn't just eaten that animal, the last breeding pair of the species might have been saved" or "Damn, if I hadn't just eaten that plant, the last breeding pair of the species that lives exclusively on this plant might have been saved"

I can also see that nuclear waste seems to be providing one of the last refuges for "natural" life on Earth.  There's this Russian woman, see, who's gone back to the Chernobyl region and taken photos of a place which has reverted back to nature, with slightly glowing animals. Check her site here.  And I'm kidding, the animals don't glow or anything, and also, we won't know how long the animals manage to live and breed in the hot zones.  But the hot zones do keep humans out, to a great extent.

So I can see the attraction of solving the problems of disposing of nuclear waste and maintaining natural forests in one solution.  And yep, it would seem that this does neatly solve both problems, although I also say that probably just putting up radioactivity warning signs would have the same effect... %)

But I can also see radical, "fundamentalist' activists thinking along the lines of my first few paragraphs, and stealing material used to safeguard a forest, and spreading that among the ecosystem at large... In fact, I predict that before 2020, some misguided group of eco warriors somewhere is going to do precisely that, seed a large chunk of prime farmland or something like that with nuclear material or some other highly toxic material.

Ironically, the greatest effect on reducing human impact might be one of our more toxic byproducts, and the best of human intentions may result in the best of human extinctions...

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HUGE Plug For Livelocal!

Here's a site that deserves promotion promotion promotion...  LiveLocal is in beta but already showing the things it can do to make a difference.  As a bonus, it's developed and operated right here in Australia but will be useful no matter where in the world you are.  And it's hopefully going to be a bit better than some DIY sites...  The idea of Livelocal is to try stuff that makes a difference and share it, hopefully leading others to also try doing similar things.  Hopefully those things are clever and ecologically sound...

The concept is very useful and will allow you to take advantage of other people's experiences and techniques for sustainable living, and deserves everyone's support.  Everyone has something to contribute on a site like this, and definitely everyone will find something they can learn from it, too.

I'm thinking that if one of the experiments was to be a home gardening information and trading post, we could do away with a lot of supermarket product and the pollution and carbon costs involved in their shipping food all over the world.  There!  An idea already!

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SmogSmart?

It seems that pollution affects intelligence in a negative manner.  But I wonder if all the possible interpretations for these data have been drawn.  The result seems significant enough, but as with every study I've seen, in an effort to be specific enough to prove a hypothesis, it's too narrow in scope to eliminate all the other variables.

My hypothesis is that parents with slightly higher potential and actual intelligence would be more aware of the ill effects of pollution in general, and would tend to avoid those areas of higher pollution.  They would be earning slightly more and thus more able to afford to avoid such areas.  They would also be slightly more aware of the need for proper and balanced nutrition, so if I was running the study I'd also be checking the parents' incomes and the health levels of the children and seeing if the more intelligent children show signs of better nutrition. (As opposed to the signs of less pollution exposure.)

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Caffeine Improves Alzheimer's .. Um .. Something ..

Growing up for some of my youth in Arabia, I'm now very glad I learned to enjoy the odd cup of coffee a day... I seem to remember a few decades ago that people were saying they reckoned coffee improved their memory.

It seems that caffeine may finish up as a treatment for people with memory problems and/or dementia issues.  Something that people obviously realised a long time ago, since coffee has always been a high valued luxury food.

The article states that caffeine improved memory in mice which have been bred to be prone to Alzheimer's, and that it reduced amyloids in the brain and blood by almost one half in both human patients and the mice.

What seems strange to me is that a percentage of people already do drink the required number of cups of coffee (five, if you're wondering, is the dose mentioned in the article) and a percentage of people get Alzheimer's.  Maybe there's already survey/research results out there that can be used to support or disprove the efficacy of caffeine?

Me, I can't wait until coffee is covered by a PBS subsidy...  %)

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Drowning In Flies? There May Be A Reason...

If you only take home one thing from this article, let it be this quote I pulled:

""Ten years ago, we would have said, 'No way. Managed relocation is a stupid idea.' And that's because the best strategy is to reduce greenhouse gases. But we are not reducing greenhouse gases fast enough.""

Insects are one of those things we take for granted, or curse, or occasionally squish.  They are also a large and important part of the whole ecosystem, and the term "Butterfly Effect" was a reference to that.  I'm more inclined to say "Honeybee Effect" because I enjoy growing vegetables and I've been following the beehive extinctions with a bit of a shudder.  Luckily there are plenty of bees around here, and show no signs of dying off.

But if you want to try just one example of the weather changes really messing with life on the planet, try and imagine a world without bees.  It's the most obvious example, but by far not the only one - and some can be a bit unexpected...

On a recent holiday to a rainforest area just north of Albany, T. and I found ourselves enveloped in absolute clouds of bushflies.  Everywhere we went, over a huge segment of the lower southwest, it seemed there'd been a population explosion of flies.  I know a fair portion of Australia, and I knew that clouds of flies like that were unusual.  So I asked a local working at one of the forestry projects.

Turns out, those fly populations had been that high before.  Around the time that people began to introduce sheep and goats and cattle, apparently...  The flies found cowpats and other excrement to be an ideal place to lay eggs, and lived the high life enjoying crapaccinos and other muscine delights.  I am not kidding!  

The pioneer farmers started the explosion, and modern more intensive farming with more animals just kind of put the crap on the cake so to speak.  That particular region is genuine humid rainforest, so the conditions for flies are ideal.

So why were there such record numbers of flies that particular year?  (As I said, I've experienced the region in other years and that particular year was orders of magnitude type worse.)  Well, a shortage of dung beetles apparently.  Yep, the local Lands and Environment departments would buy tens of thousands of dung beetles and airdrop them over the region, the beetles would roll up the poop and their larva eat the fly larva as part of their birthday celebrations.  And that year, either there was a shortage of dung beetles and therefore a higher price for them, or the local authorities didn't have pockets as deep as usual...

Now I'm trying to imagine what the region would be like if dung beetles died off worldwide due to the changing weather, and then imagine a belt of rainforest climate sweeping up Western Australia towards Perth...

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Looking After You, Or Looking The Other Way?

You take a big bite of your corn cob, and life's pretty good. Sweet juice dribbles down. Sounds like heaven? It sure is - as long as you grew the corn yourself and didn't use pesticide around it...

It seems - surprise surprise - that some big chemical companies aren't quite as scrupulous in their processes of establishing how harmful their pesticides are. Are you as surprised as I was? Uh-huh...  The devil's in the details, as usual.

"Inert" material refers to any material that's not directly involved in the pesticidal action, from what I can glean from that article.  So if I needed to suspend my pesticide ingredients in carbon tetrachloride, that becomes the "inert" material in the pesticide.  Can you see where that leads to?   Okay - maybe my example wouldn't pass muster, since carbon tet has been well and truly vilified and exposed as a nasty chemical and even a large pesticide manufacturer might have trouble slipping that in.  But when you're dealing in quantities where a difference of cost to produce of a few cents a litre results in a profit of several million dollars a year, you can see the temptation they must be under...

If you read my last article about vitamins and supplements that are less than 10% of what they claim to be, and the other 90% possibly composed of lead or other poisons, then you see the pattern.  And once again, you aren't going to change that big company's method of doing business by standing there shaking a fist at them.  You'll be much better served by avoiding their product, directly and indirectly.

I suppose I imagine this scenario, as idealistic and misguided as I am:

1. PesticideCo makes nasty pesticideX that makes people's fingernails drop off.  
2. Farmer Harry uses that pesticideX, sells his corn to SupermarketCo.
3. People (hey, that's you and me and everyone!) notice that their friends' fingernails are rolling around and
4. Start buying their corn from local farmers that don't use pesticides, and are local as well.
5. Supermarkets no longer see a demand for Farmer Harry's corn.
6. Farmer Harry gets the buzz and stops using pesticideX.
7. PesticideCo sees sales slump and decides not to make PesticideX any more.
8. They now make PesticideY, or perhaps they close up shop.

But whether PesticideCo goes broke or not, the important thing to come out of this is that you still have your fingernails because you were proactive in your own health.  And enough people just doing that will make the rest of the effects from 5 onwards.

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Supplements "Supplemented" With More Than Just "Natural Goodness"

Interesting little article here, about supplements.  The claim is that some supplements and remedies are contaminated with heavy metals and other poisons.  It's also claimed in that article that there is ten times more hoodia sold in the USA than is grown in the whole world, so yeah, there must be a lot of "hoodia" tablets out there that are less than 10% the plant and 90% fillers.  Similarly, every few months we get another article about various tablets - sold by online presences that purport to be pharmacies - which are mostly filler and/or other components, and often have serious ill effects.

Note that the following excerpt from the article:

"I believe that the problem is narrow, that the well-established and reputable brands deserve their reputations," said Michael McGuffin, president of the American Herbal Products Association.

A warning sign is that this is a spokesperson for a herbal products conglomerate, that kind of indicates a big conflict of interest in making the statement, but then it's also a pretty good general guide to life in general.  Remember that even the well-established brands have been caught out, but in general, reputations are deserved, one way or the other.  

The answer is as always - if it seems too good to be true, then it is too good to be true.  All throughout my blog I've urged people to take personal responsibility, and keep the bastards honest.  It's as true with vitamins and supplements - ask yourself why you're taking them, then ask yourself if they're really what your body needs, and if you really trust the manufacturer / supplier not to cut corners to snip themselves another percent of profit? 

Your body is pretty capable of getting its own vitamins from your daily diet - do you really need to spend that money on a product that may or may not be harmful to you without providing any benefit, or would you be better served spending it on some locally grown fresh fruit?  

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