Talk to the Animals

By: | February 8, 2011
Rex Harrison in Doctor Dolittle, 1967

For animal lovers, there may be no one more heroic than Dr. Dolittle, the title character of Hugh Lofting’s charming children’s books and Richard Fleischer’s schmaltzy movie (one of my childhood favorites). Dolittle’s patients are people, at first, until they get fed up with his growing number of house pets — rabbits, mice, pigeons, a duck, an owl, and a baby pig, among others. (One lady inadvertently sits on a hedgehog sleeping on the sofa.)

Soon Dolittle has major money troubles, and is squandering his savings on food and care for all those animals. The future is bleak. Then one morning his parrot, Polynesia, teaches him how to speak bird. After some study, he can understand all of the animals. He becomes the best animal doctor in the world, goes on all kinds of fantastical adventures, and shows us the virtue of caring for all forms of life. Animal ailments, we learn, are a whole lot like human ailments.

I thought of the good doctor today after reading about a new conference called Zoobiquity that happened a couple of weeks ago in Los Angeles. More than 200 doctors and veterinarians met to talk about how the same problems — infections, cancers, heart troubles, even mental illness — affect different species. I wish I had been there; get a load of these session titles: Glioblastoma in an Alpaca and a School Principal; Diabetic Syndromes in New and Old World Monkeys; Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in a Polar Bear and a Novelist.
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Up the Amazon

By: | February 7, 2011

The publisher did what publishers don’t much do these days: send the author on the road. The book tour did what book tours don’t much do these days: sell books. The evening of my return from the book tour, I received a Google Alert that a major newspaper was doing with my book what major newspapers don’t do much these days with any book: reviewing it. That night I went to bed with visions of double-digit Amazon numbers dancing in my head.

The next morning, my wife woke me up. Type in your name or the title of your book on Amazon, she whispered, and you don’t get the book.

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Mr. Sandman’s Diet Plan

By: | February 4, 2011

I love sleep, but I’ve been getting far too little of it. My harried days have been stretching into late nights spent staring at the computer. And I’m not alone. The National Sleep Foundation estimates that the average American gets just 6.7 hours of sleep a night on weekdays.

We’re all familiar with the side effects of sleep deprivation — drowsiness, crankiness, an unnatural fixation with beds and pillows. But did you know that a lack of sleep can cause weight gain?

Anecdotally, this feels true. Late at night you can find me ransacking the cupboards for wayward cookies or stuffing myself with gummy bears. Staying up late makes me want to eat junk. And my unhealthy cravings continue into the next day. Tired and cranky, I make myself bacon or tater tots or peanut butter and Nutella sandwiches (shut up, they’re delicious). Continue reading →

Muppet Messaging

By: | February 3, 2011
TM and © 2011 Sesame Workshop. All Rights Reserved.

American readers will probably recognize the dopey guy on the right as Elmo, of tickling fame, who lives on Sesame Street. But this isn’t Elmo, it’s his doppelgänger, Neno, who appears on Takalani Sesame, the South African version of the show. The blonde is his co-star, Kami, who will also appear on Sesame Square, a new Nigerian adaptation, slated for launch in March.

Kami is only 5 years old, but she has grown-up problems. When she was an infant, a blood transfusion left her HIV positive. Her mother had AIDS and died, leaving her orphaned.

Her story is tragic, but all too common among her audience. In South Africa, some 1.2 million children are orphaned by HIV/AIDS, and 18.1 percent of all adults carry the virus, according to UNICEF. Despite the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, South Africans have heard many confusing messages about the disease. For example, Thabo Mbeki, who was president from 1999 to 2008, is an HIV denialist: he believes that HIV does not cause AIDS and that antiviral drugs are poison.
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Oh no! Not another Iraq

By: | February 2, 2011

For the last five or six days, I’ve been searching the web for good, reliable news about what is happening to Egypt’s antiquities as the turmoil deepens in Cairo.

Are Egyptian artifacts safe in the country’s many museums, protected by soldiers perched on tanks or by human chains of young Egyptians? Or are gangs of looters taking advantage of the legitimate quest for democracy in Egypt,  and breaking into the country’s many museums and plundering its archaeological sites? In other words, are we about to see a dire loss of archaeological data similar to the one that took place in Iraq shortly after the American- and British-led  invasion in 2003? Continue reading →

Railroads, brownfields and the healing power of vegetable oil

By: | February 1, 2011

It has been a long time since railways in North America counted as anything like new technology or even, in many areas, crucial infrastructure. Still, even as recent U.S. funding for high-speed rail lines seeks to make rail travel cutting edge again, the deep legacy of the golden age of rail still marks the continent in persistent, and sometimes surprising ways.

Many of the small towns in my home province of Saskatchewan, for example, exist only because they fell at regular intervals along nascent trunks and spurs, and they still bear the names of foreign places and railway functionaries doled out by surveyors in alphabetical order. Allan, Bradwell, Clavet … on to Zumbro, and repeat.

Larger centers, such as my current hometown of San Francisco, were marked by rail lines in different, but equally lasting ways. Few people other than riders of the Caltrain commuter service here are aware that the gleaming, high-tech Bay Area has its own rust belt of derelict and barely-hanging-on industrial sites, stretching along the rail line from near downtown south into San Mateo County, along the marshy shores of San Francisco Bay. Many vistas in the San Francisco region, whether shaped by nature or man, are deservedly renowned for their splendor. Those along the Peninsula rail line, equally deservedly, are not.

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This Is Not About Climate Change

By: | January 31, 2011
Scientist advising

I read a nice essay saying that scientists make their advice to politicians too simple.  What scientists over-simplify, said the essay’s author, is their uncertainties.  I thought the author might be right: surely politicians don’t believe flat statements like, say, “climate change is making the world warmer and we’re all going to die.”  Not that this post is about climate change because it isn’t.  And anyway, don’t we all know that climate is more complicated than that? and that the science of its change is deeply uncertain? And wouldn’t politicians like knowing which uncertainties can be measured and which are so uncertain they’re not even measurable?  Distinguishing measurable from unmeasurable uncertainties is, for me, both thrilling and disturbing.

I have digressed.  Could the essay’s author – Andy Stirling, a policy researcher in the UK — kindly give me an example of science advice that isn’t simplistic?  He could, and I closely paraphrase: the chances that climate change will make the world A degrees hotter in region B over period C in relation to baseline D are in a range between E and F.  And interpretation G tends toward the E end of the range because of reason H, based on perspectives associated with context I.  “Good luck with telling politicians that,”  I thought. Continue reading →

In Defense of Hippie Cigarettes

By: | January 27, 2011

Yesterday I stumbled on a Mancouch blog post (don’t ask) in which ‘the_static’ — a young mohawk-ed guy who rides motorcycles and plays video games — sings the glories of electronic cigarettes. E-cigs, in case you haven’t heard of them, are cigarettes without the smoke. You put in a few drops of a liquid nicotine solution (‘e-juice’), and a battery-powered ‘atomizer’ heats it up. You suck in the vapors to get your fix.

Static says e-cigs are “ridiculously cheaper” than regular cigs. (It’s true in the long run: the e-cig device runs $50-100, but the liquid refills cost about $2.50 for the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes. Regular cigs cost $4.50/pack in Virginia, and $11/pack here in tax-crazed New York.)

Plus, static says, the vapor “doesn’t stink,” and you don’t have to worry about those pesky smoking bans in bars and restaurants. “Of course, a few friends of mine teased me that I was smoking a ‘hippie cigarette’,” he writes. “But then it didn’t really matter when they had to step out of the club just to smoke while I continued socializing, enjoyed my drinks and kept my urges at bay with my new e-cig.”

Oh, snap!
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