eating gamma rays

I would have rejected this as impossible until the day I read it in Science News. It reminds me of a ghastly blurb for one of Hal Clement's books asserting that "in science, nothing is impossible!" I still feel sure that plenty of things are impossible ... but not necessarily the things we thought were impossible.

In case you have trouble with the link, a quick summary is as follows: a fungus has been found that actually harvests energy from gamma rays, using the well-known pigment melanin. Do not try this at home.

Who cares about warming

Global warming is going to take a long time, but could be very costly if it happened the way some people expect, and yet, it's hard to estimate the probability that it will happen that way, given the evidence we have now.

So, logically, we should entrust our precautions against it to an organisation that knows how to plan for events that are uncertain, long-term, but very costly. Definitely not a political party ... we know how long-term they think ... much less an environmental pressure group, because they treat all propbabilities as either 1.0 (if it's something they want us to be frightened of) or 0.0 (if it's not frightening enough) ... but such organisations do exist, and have existed for a long time, and many of us know them, though few of us love them.

Have you guessed yet?

That's right: insurance companies. And they're making a difference.

Myths about heroin addiction

This one is simply wonderful. Read the first two or three paragraphs if you are short of time. One-line summary: bureaucracies usually perpetuate the problems they set out to solve. Well, there's a good deal more, and all of it good, talking about how people really become addicted and why they really stay that way (summary: they have nothing better to do or to be), but the beginning is the most widely applicable part. If I were writing the article, I might risk my skin by pointing out that the same applies to many other organisations who claim to be fighting one kind of evil or another.

I've found a fair amount of good stuff elsewhere in TheAustralian especially in the Books section.

health and housing

When I think of the difference between where I grew up (England) and where I live (the USA), I think of space. No, not SpaceShipOne. Lots of land, an acre per house at least, one one side of the Atlantic, and small gardens on the other side. Correspondingly, sprawling cities and long commutes along traffic-choked freeways, versus compact towns in which a walk or short bus ride would get me anywhere I wanted to go. (In compact towns, buses and the like are actually useful. In sprawling cities, they are a waste of time, money, fuel, or quite possibly all three.)

The huge cities of California are well known for their smog. And Americans are stereotyped for never walking if they can drive. And neither of these is believed to be healthy. And now there are numbers to prove it.