Interesting

Exploding Lakes! – The Worlds Deadliest Lake

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Photo: Jack Lockwood

I incorrectly had lakes on my list of things that don’t explode. (Yes, I do have lists like this on long rolls of parchment.) Well turns out I’m wrong – there are three exploding lakes on our crazy planet.

Lake Nyos in Cameroon is the second largest at about 390 acres, but more importantly it is the deadliest lake according to The Guinness Book of World Records (people that actually do keep track of that stuff). One would think that a deadly lake would be one that drowns a lot of people. Maybe some rip tides or something. Nope. Exploding lakes are much deadlier.

So how do lakes explode? Hot magma under Lake Nyos leaks carbon dioxide into the water, saturating it with an estimated 90 million tonnes of CO2 (a tonne is a metric ton or, equal to 2205 lbs). Most of the time this is not an issue – the CO2 sits in the water quite peacefully. But over time the water because supersaturated and a change in the environment can lead to large amounts of CO2 splurging out of the water.

And this is exactly what happened on one unlucky day in 1986. A volcanic eruption or landslide forced over 80 million cubic meters of CO2 into the air at once. This is the equivalent of 80,000 Americans’ CO2 emissions for an entire year entering the atmosphere at once. It was so forceful it knocked down the nearby trees and caused a tital wave over 80 feet high. From the Washington post:

The effect was similar to rapidly uncapping an agitated bottle of beer. Only in this case, the bottle was a mile and a quarter long, three-quarters of a mile wide and 610 feet deep, with five times as much carbonation.

The gas spilled over the lip of the lake into the valley below, displacing all the air surrounding air on the way. Since CO2 is roughly 1.5 times thicker than air, it hugged the earth and suffocated anyone unlucky enough to be sleeping in the low points within 16 miles of the lake. A 50 meter high cloud of CO2 traveled through the night silently killing 1,700 people and 3,500 livestock.

Rather than leaving you on that depressing note, you will be glad to hear that they are taking measures to make sure this doesn’t happen again. There have been pipes installed to bring some of the deepest water up to the surface – the goal being to agitate the water enough so that it never again becomes supersaturated with CO2.

Worst Parents in the World? – Two Year Old Goes to Rehab to Quit Smoking

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The youngest person ever has finished rehab – what a great success story! After 3 months in rehab, a two year old Indonesian boy has successfully kicked his smoking habit. Allegedly, he began smoking at 11 months old when his father gave him a cigarette to help ease a headache. By the time he was 2 years of age, he was smoking 2 packs a day!

Ok, maybe under these special circumstances, completing rehab with flying colors is not a success story. What an epic failure of parents! How can they be such morons? You parents out there that give into your babies anytime a tear is shed – I hope you are strong enough to hold out if your kid was begging for a cigarette. It’s hard to believe anyone can be the perfect combination of a pushover and ignoramus, let alone both parents!

If the family could continue to afford 2 packs a day and the Indonesian government hadn’t step in, I’m sure this kid would still be puffing away. But this story also delivers a great deal of hope. Hope because we now live in a world where it is no longer a possibility to be the worst parent – unless you actively try to do worse than these two Indonesians, I am quite sure you will surpass their low bar.

One or Two Spaces After the Period – How Wikipedia Handled the Ultimate Question

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Photo: Kevin Spencer

While typing, how many spaces do you put after a period? I was taught to hit the spacebar twice after the end of a sentence. Turns out not everyone does this. I knew there were single spacers out there, but I thought they were heretical troglodytes. Then I saw this poll result: with a huge sample of 44,000 people, 47% use a single space!

How does this happen? I go for soooo long thinking almost everyone was on the same page, but in reality it is split down the middle.

Once I got over my ignorance as to how the rest of the world operates, I needed to know – how did Wikipedia standardize on which one to use? Obviously if you are going to embark on an monumental distributed encyclopedia, all authors should agree to either use single or double space. I could see this holding up the entire project and just turning into a huge debate to settle it once and for all. Propitiously, the HTML of web pages renders on the screen the same way whether you do a single space or ten spaces. Problem averted.

  • It turns out the double space is a holdover from the typewriter days when fonts were monospaced. Utterly useless now and really dating me beyond my years.

  • With my lofty aspiration to be the most efficient human alive, I must cut out the extraneous second space. I’ll keep you updated on the progress.

  • Here is something else I found even more eye opening (although I will not discuss my personal proclivity): Sitters vs. Standers – The Great Wipe Hope

The Only Person with Immortal Cells – Henrietta Lacks

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In 1951 a young black woman by the name of Henrietta Lacks died of cancer. Her cancer was unlike any seen before, or since, and has transformed modern medicine – her cells are immortal!

Henrietta’s miraculous cancer cells reproduce outside of the body – in a culture dish cells typically only divide a few times before they die, but hers have been alive for almost 60 years! Scientists found the incredibly fast growth rate of her cancer grew just as fast indefinitely in a test tube. They believed her cells held the key to curing cancer and even making humans immortal – unfortunately these have yet to happen.

Her cells, called the HeLa cell line, have been sent all over the world for testing, and even out of this world (as in outer space). Never before was it possible to do long term tests on human cells without testing on an actual human – the cell line would die after a couple days outside of the body. With the HeLa line this was suddenly possible. It has been used for testing the first Polio vaccine, as well as research into cancer, AIDS, radiation effects, sensitivity to toxic substances, gene mapping, and many other medical causes.

Today over 20 tons of her cells exist in petri dishes scattered across the globe. It’s amazing that after all this time, doctors still have not discovered why the HeLa cells behave unlike any others. In the last 60 years Henrietta Lack’s cells have been instrumental in advancing modern medicine – potentially in the next 60 years they will even help find a cure for cancer.

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Outsourcing Drive Thru Jobs

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Photo: LWY

Here’s something may be a shock to you: when you pull up to a fast food, you might be talking someone in a call center thousands of miles away! It turns out numerous fast food chains have been experimenting with this over the last five years. If you are at a Wendy’s you might be talking to someone in Delaware, Jack in the Box to the Phillippines or Texas, or McDonald’s to India.

These companies claim the benefits are shorter wait times and less mistakes due to a further division of labor where each person can focus on one menial task. Well, maybe they don’t say it quite like that. It is hard to tell the extent to which this system is currently deployed in the United States – after a flurry of news stories about this experiment 4-5 years ago, the fast food companies have not informed the public how it has gone. My suspicion is that they strategically expanded the program nationwide to select franchises, specifically ones with multiple drive thru lines or notoriously hard to understand operators.

Happier With Less Choices – The Magic of Fewer Options

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Photo: i_yudai

The conclusion of a book I read this year resonated with me, and since completion I have noticed it keeps popping up in my life – that sometimes more options can have a negative effect on a decision. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz argues that if you have three choices, the consequences of adding a fourth choice will outweigh the utility of another option.

How can this be? This fourth option may be better than the other three, and if it is not, then it can simply be disregarded and you are back at three choices. Yes, that is a logical conclusion, but humans are not perfectly rational. First, this additional option will require further effort on your part to compare it to the others – if the choices are all very similar this can be excruciatingly difficult. More importantly, additional options provide the opportunity to second guess your decision. Schwartz illustrates in the book that the doubt in your mind introduced by more options will result in you being less content with the outcome.

The Jam Study
Two psychologists put this hypothesis to the test to find out if more choices can have negative effects on the decision. One study they ran was to setup a table of jam samples at a grocery store – sometimes they displayed 6 flavors and other times 24. While they found that more choices of jam incited a greater number of shoppers to sample, they were ten times more likely to buy with less choices and “reported greater subsequent satisfaction with their selections.”

The Paralysis of Analysis
The book lumps individuals into two categories: those who want the absolute best, and those who are happy with the first option that meets their requirements. Can you guess which group is happier with their outcome? Even if the perfectionist chooses a marginally better jam, they still are not as satisfied with their choice and have wasted a great deal of time.

Investing is a great example of this principle – we all know we are supposed to invest our money as early as possible to take advantage of the miracle of compound interest. But we also know that a 9% return is a whole lot better than 5%. If possible we should strive for 9%. Before we realize what has happened, the paralysis of analysis has taken hold, we have stalled looking for the perfect safe place to invest our money, and we are 45 without any investments. Just pick the first good investment that comes your way (there will always be better, no matter how much time you put into it), pick it now, and be happy!

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The Opposite of Eradication – Preserving Global Agriculture Seeds

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Photo: Mari Tefre

Yesterday I posted about the process of permanently eradicating a specific disease from the face of the earth. Today is quite the opposite, how are humans able to be ensure the global survival of plant life through major catastrophes? What if a huge fire or flood ravaged all land containing asparagus – we need to make sure that even if this happens the species will not be gone forever!

Buried 400 feet into the side of a mountain, only 810 miles from the North Pole, is a bunker that stores seeds from all over the world. There are over a half million seeds being stored there at zero degrees Fahrenheit – at this temperature most seeds can survive for hundreds of years. Even if the A/C broke, the surrounding rock is only 27 degrees. If the sea level rose several hundred feet it still wouldn’t reach the bunker. Earthquakes and volcano eruptions aren’t a concern due to the vault’s position in the middle of a tectonic plate.

Ok ok, while these doomsday scenarios are certainly interesting, they are not the primary reason for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The real reason? To protect against the loss of plant diversity. Think of dogs – even though all domestic dogs are the same species, it is obvious there is absurd diversity amongst them. If let to their own devices we would end up with all dogs being mutts.

Plants are the same way. There are potentially seeds for a specific plant that grow taller, are more resistant to cold, or taste differently just to name a few. Seed banks all over the world store backups here in case the seed lineage is accidentally misplaced or destroyed. As you can imagine preserving this biodiversity is much more important than creating a dog that can fit into a purse – one of these plants may hold the secret to curing cancer or other horrible diseases. It all comes full circle.

The Concept of Infectious Disease Eradication

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Photo: Sari Dennise

There is a big difference between eradication and elimination when it comes to diseases. Disease eradication is when the global number of cases reaches zero. Even if there is a vaccine available for a specific disease, eradication means no one will ever be in need of using that vaccine again. Elimination is not as stringently defined – it can refer getting rid of the disease in specific regions or diminishing the cases to a negligible number of unlucky and impoverished people.

There have been a total of seven global attempts to eradicate human diseases. 4 failed (hookworm, malaria, yaws, and yellow fever), 2 are ongoing (polio and guinea worm), and only 1 was successful (smallpox).

Smallpox
In the early 1950s roughly 50 million people a year contracted smallpox with a mortality rate north of 10%. Shockingly, only 30 years later the disease was declared completely eradicated.

The first vaccine for smallpox was discovered in 1796. By giving someone the similar cowpox virus, they were then immune from contracting smallpox (fun fact: the word vaccine has the Latin root vaccinus meaning of or from cows). Unfortunately this was before the advent of FedEx so a timely delivery of the vaccine all over the world was not possible. Thus, the disease persisted for another 170 years.

In the 1950s and 60s a global initiative to eradicate smallpox began. Any outbreaks were immediately quarantined and everyone who lived close by received a vaccination (I imagine it was just like the movie “Outbreak”). Why did it take over 170 years from known vaccination to complete eradication? It was as much a communication and education initiative as a medical one. Any outbreaks of smallpox had to be immediately identified and a quick response was necessary to keep it from spreading. This was simply not possible in the 1800s.

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The 27 Club – Not a Club You Want To Be a Member Of

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Photo: Feliciano Guimaraes

There have been so many rock stars who have died at age 27 that there is a club named for them – the “27 Club”. Not only did they all die at age 27, but they died under some shady circumstances.

  • Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones “drowned in a swimming pool” … or was he murdered? Ironically 27 Club members number 2 and 4 dedicated tributes to the deceased star.
  • Jimi Hendrix took way too many sleeping pills and asphyxiated on his own vomit (which contained mostly red wine).
  • Janis Joplic OD’d on heroin because her dealer gave her too potent of a stash. A good dealer always checks his potency.
  • Jim Morrison died of “heart failure” and no biopsy was preformed. Or was it another heroin overdose?
  • Kurt Cobain died of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the face. But was he able to pull the trigger with 3 times the lethal dose of heroin in his bloodstream? If so that is an impressive tolerance.

Statistically this is an anomaly. But is this just a weird coincidence or could there be an explanation behind it? Is it plausible that successful musicians take absurd, suicidal risks at age 27, after becoming wildly popular? If that isn’t weird enough, is it true that Kurt Cobain aspired to be a member of the 27 Club as a kid? (As claimed by his sister in his biography Heavier Than Heaven.)

You Can Write Laws for the United States of America – How to Propose Bills in Congress

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Photo: Hobvias Sudoneighm

Out of all the repetitive junk we were taught in school as kids, it is pretty interesting what actually stuck in my brain. One of the things I remember learning back in the day is that anyone can write a bill for Congress. This means you, despite never running for a political office in your life, have the opportunity to write laws for the United States of America.

Writing the Bill
Once you know the law you want to impose upon your fellow Americans, you have to put it down in writing. This is the easiest part of the process, and it isn’t exactly straightforward. Bills can contain hundreds of pages of lawyer language, making them very hard to understand for those who are not well versed in it. I don’t blame the members of Congress for not reading every single bill that comes to vote.

So the first step is familiarizing yourself with how similar bills are formatted and the language they use. Take a look at OpenCongress.org and imitate what you see – don’t worry, it’s not plagiarism. It is probably a good idea to have a lawyer take a look to change wording as necessary.

Introduction to Congress
This is where it starts to get difficult. Even though you wrote the bill, it must be formally introduced by a member of Congress. So the first step after writing the bill is to convince a Congressman to propose it.

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