Two Oceans

May 29, 2012 by

If you look out at the ocean, you’re actually looking out at two oceans. One is an ocean of water, the other is an ocean of air.

Yes, we live in an ocean all right – what we call the atmosphere. It’s not as heavy as water, but it’s heavy nevertheless – with a total weight of something of the order of 5.7 quadrillion tons. Here at the bottom of the air ocean, there are 14.7 pounds per square inch pressing down on us – just like at the bottom of the water ocean, where the weight is greatest. Just as you can feel water as you rush your hand through it, you can feel air as you do the same. And just as fish can swim through water, birds can “swim” through air, and humans can do so using technology.

I was always bummed out as a kid that I couldn’t fly just by flapping my arms. But little did I realize that I could fly – through water. That’s what fish do thanks to their fins. You could say they’re flying instead of swimming. Meanwhile the bottom-dwelling sea animals are walking on the land – i.e. the ocean floor – just like we’re walking on the bottom of the ocean of air.

It is said that our evolutionary ancestors evolved in the ocean of water, and then evolved to adapt to air. So we actually come from both oceans.

And the ocean of air – like the ocean of water – is the ultimate life force. It holds our oxygen. It generates the water cycle. It blocks out the sun’s harmful radiation. It prevents us from dying of extreme heat during the day and extreme cold at night. This “thin blue line” is what distinguishes our planet that’s teeming with life, from the desolation and lifelessness of the other planets of the solar system, and probably of the trillions of other planets throughout the universe. (If there are trillions of stars there’ve got to be at least that many planets orbiting them.)

So next time you go to the beach to look out at the beauty of the ocean, be sure to appreciate the beauty of both of them.

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Eat The Whole Seed

May 24, 2012 by

Quick: What is “bran”?

I bet you said a type of breakfast cereal, like raisin bran or bran flakes. That’s what I would have said up until a few days ago. Actually bran is the outer skin of the grain – i.e. a grain of wheat, a grain of rice, grain of corn, or grain of oat. Grain, by the way, is synonymous with “seed”.

And the bran of the seed is something you should be eating. In most grain-based foods, the bran along with the “germ” (the seed’s embryo) is stripped away during the processing, leaving only the endosperm or the seed’s food supply. But when you strip away the bran and the germ, you’re stripping away a lot of the nutrients. Click here for details.

No, stripping away the bran and the germ isn’t some evil plot carried out by the multinational corporations. It’s something that the multinational corporations, along with the mom-and-pop shops before them, do and did because that’s what people have always wanted. After all, wouldn’t you prefer French toast made with white bread rather than whole wheat bread?

Sometimes richer isn’t always better. In the Orient, brown rice has been associated with poverty; it’s simpler to process. The middle and upper classes generally consume white rice because they prefer the taste and texture thereof.  But they’ve been depriving themselves of the beneficial health effects of brown rice, which contains the bran and the germ. A similar situation has held true in the West. In days of old, grist mills refined grains down to flour consisting of just the endosperm because that’s what people wanted. It was a more expensive process, so mainly just the middle and upper-income classes could afford it. Ironically that often resulted in worse health among the upper classes. Captains of ships would come down with health conditions that the sailors avoided, because the sailors were eating foods made from the less-expensive whole grain flour.

Whole grain is just that – all of the grain: the bran, germ and endosperm. Ironically, because our food processing infrastructure is tailored toward non-whole-grain foods, whole grains today are usually (but certainly not always) more expensive.

Whole-grain foods include brown rice, oatmeal, breakfast cereals containing the word “bran” in their names, buckwheat pancakes, and other foods with “whole grain” or “whole wheat” written on their labels.

So avoid the fate of the middle and upper class people of the Orient, and don’t deprive yourself of whole grain foods.

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Lactose Intolerant? You’re Normal

April 27, 2012 by

A recent page 1 WSJ article reports on China’s efforts to expand its domestic milk production capacity. But the article has a gaping hole. Reportedly, some 95 percent of Asians above the age of five are lactose intolerant (lactose intolerance doesn’t begin until around that age). So that begs the question: Where is all this demand for milk in China coming from?

Is it coming from the 5 percent? The five-and-under crowd? Is the lactose being removed during the production process? Are people drinking milk despite their lactose intolerance, and suffering the consequences? Is it just a myth that 95 percent of Asians are lactose intolerant? Questions like these needed to be answered in the article.

At any rate, the subject of lactose tolerance is most interesting. It’s evolution in action.

To be lactose intolerant isn’t an abnormality or aberration. It’s more of an aberration to be lactose tolerant. Humans weren’t designed to drink milk beyond the toddler years.

Lactose tolerance is said to have arisen in cattle-raising societies: in Europe around 6,000 or 7,000 years ago, and in East Africa around 4,500 years ago.

A gene mutation gave some people the ability to drink cow milk without getting diarrhoea, stomach aches and other symptoms associated with lactose intolerance. Observe the following advantages of milk amid harsh living conditions:

Milk is uncontaminated by parasites, unlike stream water, making it a safer drink. Also, if those that were intolerant of lactose tried to drink the milk, they would develop diarrhoea and vomiting – this could be lethal in difficult living conditions and they could therefore die of dehydration in the most extreme cases. Another suggestion is the benefit of having a continuous supply of milk as opposed to seasonal crops – cows will give milk all year round whereas crops can only thrive at certain times in the year. Also, milk has many nourishing properties – it is high in fat and calcium, amongst other nutrients. All in all, the ability to drink milk gave some early Europeans and East Africans a big survival advantage.

That was in Europe. Some 90 percent of Danes and Swedes are lactose tolerant. The farther south you go in in Europe, the less lactose tolerance. About 50 percent of Spanish and French are said to be lactose tolerant. And according to this same source, in non-pastoral societies such as China only 1 per cent of the population are lactose tolerant.

So if you’re lactose intolerant, don’t sweat it. You’re normal. Some 60 percent of adults fall into that category. If you’re lactose tolerant, you have your cattle-raising ancestors to thank.

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Intelligent Life Out There? Maybe, But They’ll Never Come Here

March 28, 2012 by

Astronomers have concluded there could be billions of other planets in our galaxy capable of supporting life, and hundreds of them within just 30 light years of earth.

Just 30 light years? Get me my astronaut suit! If we were to set out for one of those planets in one of our 20,000-mph spacecraft, we’d reach it in a mere one-million-five-thousand years!

As far as ever reaching the speed of light or even just 1 percent of that speed, that’s impossible. Aliens from other worlds may exist, but they have never and can never visit us. All those stories you hear about UFOs and alien abductions? Total bunk. The distances are just too vast.

Cozying Up to One of the Only Campfires in Antarctica

A related but different subject: Next time you’re feeling miserable in the hot sun, just picture this: Antarctica during the dark season, with only a few campfires scattered throughout the whole continent, and you happen to be next to one of those campfires feeling its warmth (but not close enough to burn yourself). That’s how it is with us vis-à-vis our sun. We’re in the middle of trillions and trillions of cubic miles of emptiness and near-absolute zero and desolation, but happen to be just close enough to a star to feel its warmth but not close enough to burn up. (To put it into scale, if the sun were the size of a campfire, it would be about 1,000 km away from the next closest star.)

Likewise, next time you’re out in the cold, just remember that cold is only relative. You’re actually feeling heat from the sun, but less of it than you’re used to. You want cold? Try absolute zero, or 455 below zero on the Farenheit scale. That (or a couple of degrees above that) is the norm in this universe.

The potential temperature range is from near-absolute zero out beyond Pluto, to a thousand degrees near Venus (and of course a lot hotter closer to the sun). The temperatures most of us experience  – from summer to winter – are just a tiny, tiny fluctuation within that larger temperature range. A small blip downward makes us feel cold, and a small blip upward makes us feel hot.

We happen to be just the right distance from one of the huge nuclear reactors that are peppered throughout the galaxy, separated by unimaginably large voids of near-absolute zero.

So be thankful we’re living just close enough to a galactic campfire so that, most of the time, we’re neither too cold nor too hot.

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Two Centuries With No Quakes? That’s Nothing.

January 14, 2010 by

The earth hiccups, and humans die en masse.

Yes, a quake for mother earth is the equivalent to a hiccup or knuckle crack for a human. In the geologic scheme of things, pieces of the earth’s crust are constantly sliding toward, away, and past each other – just as natural for the earth as, say, you moving your arm from here to there. And just as sometimes you may feel a little crack in your elbow joint when you move your arm, sometimes there’s a crack when the pieces of the earth’s crust get a little stuck and then pop free. Looking at it from a geologic timeframe, the pops or earthquakes are a very routine and frequent occurrence for mother earth. If you were to watch a time lapse movement of the tectonic plates, there would be these constant little (for the earth) pops everywhere.

But humans are tiny compared with mother earth, so the pops shake us to our core. And our lives on this planet are so short compared with geologic time that what’s common and routine for the earth seem like rare and major events to us. So in most places around the world we don’t plan for them well.

In Haiti there hadn’t been a large earthquake in two centuries. That seems like eons to us humans, but it’s a brief flicker of time for the earth. It only represents a few feet of movement for the tectonic plates – again, tiny compared with the thousands of miles the plates move in geologic time.

So without a major quake in two centuries, we humans get complacent and carry on as if quakes are a thing of the past. We couldn’t be more wrong. Of course, the same applies to humans elsewhere on the earth – not just for quakes but all sorts of other geologic phenomena like volcanoes and tsunamis.

There were the great earthquakes of 1811-1812 centered near New Madrid, Missouri that shook most of the eastern U.S. (because it’s one big plate here – not broken into pieces like in the western U.S.). There even was damage as far away as Washington, D.C. Those of us in the East are complacent because that happened two centuries ago. But from the earth’s perspective it was just a few seconds ago. And at any second, the same thing could happen again.

Unlike in places like California where there are strict building codes to mitigate the impact of quakes, we in the East aren’t prepared, because we’ve become so complacent.

The other factor is population. Two centuries ago, both in Haiti and the eastern U.S., the population was tiny compared with now. The number of buildings, especially multi-story ones, were scant compared with now. Earthquakes were far less consequential back then. The population explosion over the last two centuries has really made us vulnerable to earthquakes – especially in third world countries like Haiti where population growth has been particularly fast and where the quality of buildings and infrastructure has been poor. Given that earthquakes are a sure thing – when not if – mass death in Haiti and elsewhere is a sure thing. When, not if.

But it’s only a sure thing when there’s no planning for earthquakes. There’ve got to be building codes and implementation thereof that result in high-enough quality structures and infrastructure so that earthquakes can be withstood.

Of course, in a desperately poor and underdeveloped place like Haiti and other third world locales, there’s not much room for optimism. To make the place earthquake proof you need economic development. How to achieve that in Haiti is the big question – certainly not enough room in this blog post to go into that now.

But at least we can learn the lesson here at home. No major quakes in the last two centuries here in the eastern U.S. isn’t saying much. Another major quake could happen at any time. Federal, state and local governments should revamp building codes to ensure that any new building is quake proof. And existing buildings should be evaluated.

Find out how earthquake proof the buildings are in which you live and work. If they fall short, then start rattling some cages.

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