755 out of 500!

Have you guys seen the news out of Beijing lately? No? That's probably because it got trapped in the crazy smog that is shrouding the city. Over the course of January, Beijing (along with its environs) has been repeatedly shrouded in a giant cloud of smog, which has degraded the air quality to a startling extent. A few weeks ago, the U.S. Embassy recorded an Air Quality Index of 755, on a scale of 0 to 500, where 500 is Hella Bad (my words), and above 500 is not even defined. The EPA calls any AQI above 301 "hazardous," as in "don't go outside; breathing is bad for you out there." According to The Atlantic, things got even more off-the-charts bad later in the month:

At the height of recent pollution, Beijing authorities said readings for PM2.5 -- particles small enough deeply to penetrate the lungs -- hit 993 micrograms per cubic metre, almost 40 times the World Health Organization's safe limit.

At least 19 days in January featured hazardous air, and on January 29, thick smog covered almost one seventh of China. This, as you can imagine, caused major traffic chaos on highways and severe disruptions in air traffic. The smog got so bad that the Chinese media actually started reporting on it, an occurrence that itself was so newsworthy that the New York Times wrote a whole article about it. Hospital admissions for respiratory conditions have spiked dramatically.

The Atlantic published a series of startling photographs today of the smog, some of which show the same exact area of Beijing on a normal day and a smoggy day. My jaw dropped when I saw some of the pictures. No wonder The Atlantic called the series "China's Toxic Sky".

Captions mine

And I thought driving in LA was bad...

This plane ACTUALLY TOOK OFF

Perhaps not surprisingly, air purifiers in Beijing are apparently going for about $2000 a pop. That's communism for you!

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Want to know where in the world the worst air pollution in the world is? This slightly out-of-date chart from NASA should help. Hint: It's China.

As if I needed *another* reason to be scared of the ocean

Man. Have you guys heard about cookie-cutter sharks?  I read an article about them last week and I think I'm going to have nightmares forever. "Cookie-cutter" sharks may sound adorable (who doesn't love cookies, after all), but don't be fooled--these buggers are terrifying little hell-raisers that attack things like great white sharks, dolphins, tuna, Orcas,...AND PEOPLE.* They're so awful that one shark expert (the alliteratively named Stewart Springer) apparently called  them "demon whale-biters," though he later popularized the "cookie cutter" moniker...maybe because he felt bad for calling them names? Personally, I think he over-corrected.

The primary thing that makes cookie cutter sharks so scary is their teeth, which are basically serrated saw blades (all connected together in one menacing piece), and the way that they use said teeth to attack things. Here's how a blogger at NatGeo described the animal:

It looks like a demonic cigar. It’s a small cat-sized animal with chocolate-coloured skin, a rounded snout, and large green eyes. Beneath the bizarre head, its lower jaw contains what looks like a saw—a row of huge, serrated teeth, all connected at their bases.

When the cookie-cutter finds a victim, it latches on with its large fleshy lips and bites down with its saw blade. With twisting motions, it scoops out a chunk of flesh, leaving behind circular craters...These are serious injuries—the biggest craters ever recorded were 5 centimetres wide and 7 centimetres deep. (These chunks are conical, so the cookie-cutter metaphor isn’t quite right; “Ice cream scoop shark” or “watermelon baller shark” are more accurate, if less catchy.)

Apparently, cookie cutter sharks have the biggest
teeth of any shark, in relation to their jaws.

Terrifying, right??? If you were ever unlucky enough to be attacked by a cookie cutter shark (which you probably won't be, as they only come out at night, and who in their right mind swims in the ocean at night?!), the main problem you would have is that your wound CAN'T HEAL. To quote someone who appears to have no medical training, but who LiveScience talked to about cookie cutter shark bites nonetheless,

Not only is [a cookie cutter shark bite] painful, but it presents a difficult circumstance for recovery in the sense that there has to be plastic surgery to close the wound and you have permanent tissue loss.

Oh, no biggie, I just had some flesh scooped out of me by a demon whale biter. 

*Shudder*. Mark this as reason #2 why I plan never again to swim in the ocean. (Reason #1 is accidental paralysis, as described here.)

Now, I'd better get to something less horrible. You're welcome for this cheerful Monday pick-me-up!




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*And Submarines! According to Wikipedia:

During the 1970s, several U.S. Navy submarines were forced back to base for repairs by cookiecutter shark bites to the neoprene boots of their AN/BQR-19 sonar domes, which caused the sound-transmitting oil inside to leak and impaired navigation. An unknown enemy weapon was initially feared, before this shark was identified as the culprit, and the problem was solved by installing fiberglass covers around the domes.In the 1980s, some thirty U.S. Navy submarines were damaged by cookiecutter shark bites, mostly to the rubber-sheathed electric cable leading to the sounding probe used to ensure safety when surfacing in shipping zones. Again, the solution was to apply a fiberglass coating.

Heh heh heh

There's POOP on the MOON!

That's all I have to say about that.

Oh, except that if you want to know more about the non-sexy aspects of going into space, I highly recommend Packing for Mars, by Mary Roach.

zOrbMG

If you want to avoid death by inflatable rubber ball, I suggest you avoid 'Zorbing'* down a Russian mountainside. That's because two guys who recently did just this ended up plunging down the side of a mountain, over a cliff, into a ravine, and on to a frozen lake--a ride that snapped one guy's neck. And of course the internet is abuzz with this news because somebody videotaped the entire thing and put it up on the interwebs.

According to Wikipedia, "Zorbing (globe-riding, sphereing, orbing) is the recreation or sport of rolling downhill in an orb, generally made of transparent plastic." According to me, Zorbing is a tremendously stupid thing to do when there is a cliff nearby and no barrier of any kind between you and the cliff. But that's just me.

That little ball there? It's got two guys inside it.
It's about to rocket down a mountain and go over a cliff
and kill one of the guys. The experience only cost $10!
A full video of the incident can be found here.

Reddit had a long discussion about what it might be like to be inside a plastic ball tumbling down a mountain. It doesn't sound pleasant.

This is one of the worst ways to die. At those speeds your senses would be totally fucked, your brain scrambled by the constant spinning. No concept of up or down, or what has gone wrong. Just a blur. Then jolting and pounding that gets stronger and harder. Then your vision turns to red. All the while hearing the horrific sound of gutteral [sic] screaming in an echochamber [sic] made of inflatable rubber.

AND IT'S ONLY WEDNESDAY Y'ALL. More horror to come, if I manage to blog all the stuff I've been collecting.

Hypochondriac panic

Oh man, you guys. First, I had a neck ache all day, prompting me to worry that I have meningitis. And then my arm goes numb for no good reason. Is that a symptom of meningitis? I'm scared to ask the internet. It's probably normal, right?

My year in books, 2012 edition

I started writing this post on New Year's Eve Eve, and then almost immediately realized that all I wanted to do with the end of my 2012 was sit like a lump on a log and coast into 2013. So that is almost exactly what I did, breaking of course for some New Year's Eve socializing and some New Year's Day shopping at Ikea (how did I spend 2 whole hours there, and why oh why did I buy those things I now need to return this weekend?!)...and now it's suddenly the third day of 2013 and I guess I need to start engaging in the world again. So hey, why not finish my year-end wrap up of the books I read in 2012?

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I usually like to do some kind of summation here at year's end, but I didn't really blog enough to summarize the year in posts (no posts in May, June OR July? I am a terrible blogger), and I don't have the energy at the moment to do the same thing I did last year. So why not focus on something easy and awesome, like my year in BOOKS? After all, 2012 was a banner year in books for your favorite doomsday blogger.

In 2012 I consumed (i.e. read or listened to) a record-breaking 51 books, and at year end I was more than halfway through two more.* Last year (2011) I only consumed 44 books, and the year before (2010), 46. The year before THAT (2009), if my accounting is accurate that far in the past, I consumed a measly 31. So yeah, I made myself 51 books smarter in 2012, and I'm rather proud of that. I'm less proud that I didn't manage to finish the last two stragglers, but I guess they give me a jump on 2013.**

Okay. Without further ado, I present to you my year in books.

The highlights

• 78% of the books I consumed were fiction.

• Only 18% of the books I consumed this year were real paper books.

• I read 10,177 pages, 75% of which were in fiction books.

***Chart shows page counts for Kindle and real books only.
Page counts are based on the print copy (paperback if available
at time of calculation, hardcover if not).

• I spent almost 12 full days listening to audio books. 84% of that time was spent listening to fiction audio books.

Total: 280 hours, or 11.7 days. Most of that time was
either spent driving or cooking. Not a bad use of my time!

More fun facts, but fewer graphs 

• Number of dystopian novels consumed: 10 (plus one in the works, and I'm not sure whether to count 11/22/63 or not, so I didn't). 
• Best dystopian novel consumed: Brave New World, followed by Wool and The Road (tie).
• Longest book consumed (in pages): 11/22/63, by Steven King. 880 pages (or 30 hours and 44 minutes of listening time, making it also the longest book consumed in minutes).
• Number of books consumed that exceeded 500 pages: 7. Number of books consumed that were between 400 and 500 pages: 12. Histogram of book length (in pages): provided below.

Figure includes Kindle, real, and audio books. Page counts
are based on the print copy (paperback if available at time
of calculation, hardcover if not).

• Book that took the longest to read (in days): Ireland, by Frank Delaney: 168 days. 
• Book I liked the least: Ireland, by Frank Delaney.
• Book that took the second-longest to read (in days): Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, by Gary Taubes. 127 days.
• Book I liked the second-least: Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell.
  
• Average number of days it took to consume each book: 20. Median number of days: 11.
• On a scale of one to five stars, average rating given to books consumed: 3.19 stars. Median rating: 3 stars.
• Correlation between time spent consuming the book (in days) and stars given: -.36.
  
• Most favorite book of the year: hands down, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing.
• Fun Fact: Shackleton's right-hand man, Tom Creen, was Irish, and when he got home after the above-mentioned (and aptly named) Incredible Voyage he opened up this pub, which I almost went to when I was in Ireland, except I didn't, because it was closed. Alas.
• Five best fiction books consumed in 2012: Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley; Among the Missing, by Dan Chaon; Elegies for the Brokenhearted, by Christie Hodgen; Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan; and Museum of the Weird, by Amelia Grey.

Want to know more about my reading? Boy howdy, are you in luck! A Google spreadsheet I nerdily made of my 2012 reading can be found here, and of course, you can always keep up to date with my reading on Goodreads.

Happy(?) 2013!

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*One of which is the eternally long and never-ending The Idiot, which if you'll remember I enthusiastically blogged about in October. Since then, I have grown less and less enamored with the novel, and now I'm just ready for it to be over already, except it's not over, because I can never bring myself to read very much of it at a time. Sometimes I go so long in between stints of reading it that I completely forget who some of the characters are, and what their motivations in the drama might be, and I am therefore quite lost. I had to read the entire second section twice because I retained nothing from it, and if I were to do the book justice I'd need to re-read the third as well, but I'm only 100 pages away from the end at this point and I'm going to keep plowing along. When I'm done I'll probably read the Wikipedia plot summary to grasp the finer points of the plot that are currently eluding me.
**My policy on counting books is that I count them in the year and month in which I finish them.