Category: Life

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You wouldn’t think that books about astronomy and archaeology would have a lot in common, but Four Lost Cities (Annalee Newitz) and Under Alien Skies (Phil Plait) pack some odd similarities.

Both are about places we (mostly) can’t visit in person: Faraway planets in one case, the distant past in the other.

We have to piece together parts of the experience from what has come to us through time or through space: Telescopic observations, space probes, spectral analysis, and our understanding of physics — ruins, artifacts, aerial surveys and
what we know about people (both contemporary and in general).

For some sites we have very detailed and solid information: Angkor’s stone temples are still standing. Pompeii was well-preserved under volcanic ash and we still have first-hand writings about the city and its destruction. Mars and the moon have been extensively surveyed, including multiple landers and photographs from the surface. (And, in the case of the moon, a handful of people!)

Others require a lot of speculation: There’s a solid core of what we’ve figured out about Cahokia, but a lot of unknowns that we can sorta-kinda extrapolate from the histories and tales of surviving tribes in the area — but only to a point. Similarly, we know the rough structure of the TRAPPIST-1 solar system and some of its planets, but we have to speculate: if one of the planets in the habitable zone actually is habitable, what conditions would that require?

Both include major discoveries made within the last decade: Pluto and Charon were just a pair of dots until the New Horizons mission flew past it in 2015, bringing us pictures and measurements and so much data it took months just to download it from the probe back to Earth. Lidar surveys at Angkor in 2012 revealed the foundations of a vast metropolitan area around the temple complexes, upending our sense of how big the city was and identifying new sites to investigate.

It’s kind of funny how I read them so close together. Synchronicity and all that. They’re also both good (see also my review of Four Lost Cities and review of Under Alien Skies), and I’d definitely recommend them!

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At first I thought this was a followup to another story about an anaphylactic reaction during an airplane flight last week. No, it’s a totally separate incident.

One patient had an expired epi-pen. The other had never had anaphylaxis before.

Both planes had bottles of epinephrine and a syringe, not an auto-injector. Fortunately there were doctors on both flights who knew how to figure out the dosage, properly fill and deliver a shot.

In the second incident, the patient who was experiencing anaphylaxis for the first time is a doctor, but…have you ever tried loading a syringe and injecting yourself while your throat’s rapidly closing up until you can’t breathe? There’s a reason they make auto-injectors!

It could be worse: the same site has an article about another in-flight reaction a month ago, where staff couldn’t get the emergency kit open for 10 minutes! This time it was a pair of nurses who measured and administered the shot.

This…seems to be more common than I thought it was.

And putting an emergency kit on the plane without training your flight crew how to use it is just ridiculous.

(Reminders to self: 1. Check epi-pen expiration date. 2. Make sure it’s easy to find in my carry-on next time I travel.)

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Food companies are adding sesame flour to foods that didn’t have sesame so they can “comply” with new labeling requirements by always labeling “contains sesame” instead of instead of adding it to their existing cross-contamination protocols.

Meaning people with sesame allergy are suddenly finding that foods they used to be able to eat are now hazardous.

This is like a skydiving outfit deciding to stop maintaining their parachutes and disavow responsibility in their waiver instead of complying with a requirement to maintain their parachutes a little better than they were doing before.

Actually it’s worse than that. It’s like actively damaging some of the parachutes, and adding fine print saying that people who want well-maintained parachutes shouldn’t fly with them. And not mentioning it to repeat customers outside of that fine print.

You wouldn’t add wheat to a dish just to avoid having to guarantee it was gluten-free. Or add lead to your water so you don’t have to worry about keeping environmental contamination out. Or…

Ugh, those sound way too probable. People can be awful sometimes, and business has a tendency to remove ethics from decision making.

Update: Malicious compliance is a good term for it.

Not the first time

And apparently this wasn’t the first time companies have done this crap, either. After the 2016 labeling law went into effect, some companies added peanut flour to foods that didn’t have it. Not enough to impact the baking or texture or flavor…but enough to trigger an allergic reaction.

Disturbingly, I missed that previous round. I say disturbingly because I actually am allergic to peanuts, so I’m lucky I didn’t end up in the ER from something that used to be safe. I can only think of two explanations for why I didn’t notice:

By 2016, I was doing most of my grocery shopping at some of the slightly crunchier stores, and buying snacks from smaller brands that were either less likely to take that shortcut, or already had foods I was allergic to by the time I took my first look at the ingredients panel.

2016 was also the year the Epi-Pen price-gouging scandal boiled over.

Corporations behaving badly

Pharma giant Mylan had already gained a virtual monopoly on epinephrine auto-injectors. After FARE spent years lobbying for states to require epinephrine to be stocked in schools for emergencies, Mylan raised the price of the auto-injector drastically (a factor of 5 or 6), to the point where many people who needed them couldn’t afford it anymore.

Whether FARE was used itself, or a co-conspirator who used its members, I lost a lot of trust in them and stopped following their newsletters as closely. That was also the last year I participated in FARE’s Walk for Food Allergy fundraiser, and I only did that after they stopped accepting money from Mylan.

(Interesting note: The Intercept article mentions that Mylan deliberately set out to stop selling single Epi-Pens in the early 2010s and only sell the two-packs in order to justify charging more. I was already carrying two-pack at my allergist’s recommendation, which turned out to be highly fortunate the time in 2006 or so when I was hit by anaphylaxis and messed up the first injection.)

Expanded from a thread on Wandering.shop

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We know trees can reduce the urban heat island effect. A Nature Conservancy project is combining data on current tree coverage, heat, health, income, energy sources and more to determine where planting new trees would most help the communities currently most affected by the problem. (Note: The article’s in the context of Google’s role in the data analysis & visualization.)

I looked at the data from my local area, and it not only prioritized the areas I know are lower-income with fewer trees, it prioritized where people actually live, too. There are some areas that have very low tree coverage but are also rated very low priority…because they’re mall parking lots, light industry, heavy industry, office parks, etc.