My life. Maybe yours.

Title: A perpetual motion (well, until you die) machine. By Indexed. 

Ain't nothing you can do about this one but worry

In my senior year high school yearbook, there was a section in the back, doubtlessly mass-produced in many other yearbooks of vintage 1999, in which notable events and news stories from the past year were described. While I'm sure there were many important things in there, the only one I remember (and I remember it vividly) was a mouse with what looked like* a human ear growing out of its back.**

At the time, I was fascinated and repelled by the mouse with the ear on its back. Revisiting it now, I find I still am, so much so that I will decline from posting a picture, though there are plenty on the web if you Google it or click some of the links on this page. I mean, I know the intention was to see if we could grow parts for human transplant on mice, which is nice and all, but the resulting creature is quite grotesque. Okay, totally grotesque.

Which is all to say that I'm super glad I don't (to my knowledge) have any errant parts (human or otherwise) growing where they don't belong. You may think it's silly to be glad about such a thing, but once I tell you about what I discovered yesterday you'll think yourself the silly one.

Here's what I discovered: Humans, after they are fully formed and growing up and living normally, sometimes GROW EXTRA BITS WHERE THEY DON'T BELONG. And I'm not talking about cancer. I'm talking about actual body parts. How terrifying is that!?

From a blog at National Geographic:

One of the most common examples of misplaced cells seems to be livers. They grow all over the place. The first reported case, in 1922, described a liver growing on a gallbladder. Since then doctors have found other livers in gallbladders...as well as in the thoracic cavity, pancreas, esophagus, and on adrenal glands sitting atop the kidneys. A recent review finds 74 so-called ectopic livers reported in the medical literature, and offers no explanation.

Then there are the errant bones. Take a 2005 report of an 85-year-old woman in the U.K. who went to the doctor for bowel troubles. For a month, she had experienced alternating diarrhea and constipation. The doctors had no idea what it could be, so they peered inside her large intestine. They found a 1.5-centimeter pale brown polyp and sent it to the lab for testing. And what was that polyp? A piece of bone. In her colon. Why was it there? Unclear. Similarly, last year, researchers from India described a 16-year-old girl who couldn’t see out of her right eye. The vision loss had started six years earlier, when she suffered “accidental trauma by fist of hand.” Surgeons removed the eye and, a few weeks later, gave her an artificial one. When they analyzed the damaged eye in the lab, they found pieces of adult bone, with marrow and all.

Just one more...In 2007, researchers from Japan reported the case of an 11-year-old girl with a brain tumor. She had had the mass since birth and her doctors had been watching it closely throughout her childhood. By age 11, she needed surgery to remove it. Later, researchers analyzed the dissected tissue. And it was totally weird. As one study put it: “The initial histological analysis demonstrated a tumor growing out of what appeared to be nearly normal looking pancreas.” Pancreas. In her brain.

ACK. I wish I could un-learn all of that! Since I can't, I figure the second best thing is to share the horror.

I had a nightmare last night in which a femur grew out of my eye. I think the internet might be bad for my health.

*****

Bonus: here's two low-quality pictures from my high school days, stolen from someone on Facebook:

The good ol' basement, and its plaid couch.

Disco party! Definitely not a sausage fest.

*Turns out it wasn't an actual human ear, but rather some cow cartilage shaped to look like an ear. But I didn't know that until...right now.
**Wikipedia says this ear mouse ("Vacanti mouse") was unveiled in 1997, so I'm not really sure what it was doing in my yearbook. Did that section include highlights from my whole high school career, perhaps?

Australia is hereby crossed off the list of places I would consider living

Imagine walking into your charity store to find a hole in the ceiling, vomit on the floor, and all kinds of things messed up. You'd probably conclude a burglar broke in, vomited everywhere, made a mess, and left, right? Only...why didn't the burglar take anything?

Oh, it's because it's not a burglar. It's a 19-FOOT PYTHON. Which lay undetected in the charity store for a whole day after the break-in.

That's something that apparently happens in Australia, according to NPR/The AP:

Australian police were mystified by a chaotic crime scene including a hole in the ceiling and a smelly pool of vomit-like liquid — until they found the culprit was a 5.7-meter (19-foot) python.

The massive snake weighing in at 17 kilograms (37 pounds) was captured a day after a suspected burglary was reported at a charity store in Queensland in northeastern Australia.

"Its head was the size of a small dog," Police Sgt. Don Auld said Wednesday.

Before they found the python, investigators' working theory was that a human burglar with an appetite for destruction — and a serious illness — had gone on a rampage inside the St. Vincent de Paul store in the small town of Ingham.

"We thought a person had fallen through the ceiling because the roof panel was cut in half," Auld said. "When they've hit the floor, they've vomited and then staggered and fallen over. That's what we thought anyway."

Police now suspect the python entered the store through the roof, which was damaged in a cyclone two years ago.

The animal then plummeted through the ceiling, knocking over dishes, clothes and other items, before relieving itself on the floor. It somehow managed to hide from officials until staff spotted it lying alongside a wall the next day.

Can I just repeat what happened? A 37-pound 19-foot-long snake apparently lived in the roof of a building for some period of time, then fell through the ceiling, "vomiting"* everywhere, and then HID FOR A WHOLE DAY. I don't even want to GO to Australia anymore**, lest I wander into a place with a giant snake hiding out! I have the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it.

Dear god.

*The "vomit" turned out to be "snake urine and feces," by the way.
**Lies. I totally do. I need to snorkel the Great Barrier Reef before it's dead!

Speaking of the Great Barrier Reef...

Sigh. Ever since I did my 6th grade Endangered Species Report on the Galapagos Penguin, I've wanted to go to the Galapagos Islands. And now I learn that tourists are ruining the island...what a conundrum!

Via

Time to book a trip to the Great Barrier Reef

RIP Coral Reefs.

All Coral Reefs Could Die by Century’s End

Every coral reef in the world will probably die off by the end of this century unless the production of carbon dioxide is curtailed severely, researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science report. Accelerated carbon dioxide production is making the oceans more acidic, thus preventing the basic skeletons of coral reefs from being made.

Better get on that dream to snorkel in the Great Barrier Reef!*

Lighthouse Reef, Belize - Photograph by Brian Skerry, National Geographic

*...Although, maybe not. Are there starfish there? Starfish really creep me out.

Ugggggh, so creepy. Via.

The torpid brain...has grown too weak for sustained thought

I guess I'm not the only one overwhelmed by the pace of "modern" day life.

So busy!

I should probably blog more...but you know, life.

Not dead, just restin'

Hello, friends and strangers. It was recently brought to my attention that I haven't been doomsday prophesying very much at all this year. Rest assured I haven't stopped reading about horrible things; I've just stopped writing about them. Things are busy, you know. I got promoted at work, my car got covered in tar, and to get it off I had to coat the entire thing with peanut butter and then rinse it off (which took even longer than you might expect), I've joined a bunch of "sports" leagues, as well as a wine tasting club, and now I'm thinking about moving, or maybe even buying a place. But those are all excuses and distractions from the real meat of this post, which is supposed to be a bunch of links to articles that recently caught my attention.

As I'm sure the world is clamoring for more of my overreactions to things that I read, I won't make any further ado.

1. The bees are still dying in droves. It might be due to pesticides. You should worry because we need the bees to pollinate our food!

Annual bee losses of 5 percent to 10 percent once were the norm for beekeepers. But after colony collapse disorder surfaced around 2005, the losses approached one-third of all bees, despite beekeepers’ best efforts to ensure their health.Nor is the impact limited to beekeepers. The Agriculture Department says a quarter of the American diet, from apples to cherries to watermelons to onions, depends on pollination by honeybees. Fewer bees means smaller harvests and higher food prices.

Related: Beekeepers are suing the EPA over insecticides.

A year after groups formally petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), four beekeepers and five environmental and consumer groups filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court against the agency for its failure to protect pollinators from dangerous pesticides.  The coalition, represented by attorneys for the Center for Food Safety (CFS), seeks suspension of the registrations of insecticides that have repeatedly been identified as highly toxic to honey bees, clear causes of major bee kills and significant contributors to the devastating ongoing mortality of bees known as colony collapse disorder (CCD).  The suit challenges EPA’s ongoing handling of the pesticides as well as the agency’s practice of “conditional registration” and labeling deficiencies.

2. Speaking of modern farming ruining everything, toxic algae bloomed like crazy all over Lake Erie in 2011 because the lake was overloaded with phosphorous and other nutrients from fertilizer and other agricultural runoff. Apparently, we can expect similar events in the future if farming practices aren't changed.

In 2011, Lake Erie experienced the largest algae bloom in its recorded history. At its peak in October, the mat of green scum on the lake’s surface was nearly four inches thick and covered an area of almost 2,000 square miles. That’s three times larger than any other bloom in the lake, ever. Plus it was toxic. Now research shows that such an event may become increasingly common.

3. A vial containing a virus that can cause hemorrhagic fever has gone missing from a research facility in Galveston. Let me repeat that: a vial containing a virus that can cause hemorrhagic fever has gone missing from a research facility in Galveston. Oh hey, where'd I put that hemorrhagic fever? I hope it's not at the bottom of my purse with my car keys.

4. Oh man, did you know that Visine, if swallowed, acts as a neurotoxin?

Used as directed, [eyedrops] may indeed give you that clear-eyed look but that’s mostly due to the constriction of blood vessels in the eye. Internally they also induce vasoconstriction (as Toxnet calls it).  The resulting symptoms...include rapid heart beat, nausea, blurred vision, drowsiness, convulsions. The Toxnet entry, based partly on cases of children who  swallowed a bottle of eyedrops or nosedrops left carelessly on a table or counter,  notes that “drowsiness and mild coma” often alternate with periods of thrashing and hyperactivity.

Remind me to keep eyedrops out of the reach of anyone who might be mad at me.

5. "Just because shit is depressing or horrible, doesn’t mean you can’t laugh about it with blood in your mouth." Natalie Dee is awesome.

6. Cow pee spreads antibiotic resistance through the soil. Chew on that. Or don't.

7. Venice flooded like crazy late last year. Is this a portent for the world to come? Survey (of me only) says yes.

8. No more letting Timmy chew on the dirt! Seems like lead is getting into kids' blood, from the soil.

While homeowners have learned over the years how to better manage old, peeling lead paint, the lead that was in gasoline was deposited on the ground and is still scattered throughout soils in many postindustrial U.S. cities. Kids still play in that dirt, and little kids may even eat it on occasion.

In a February paper published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, McElmurry and a team of economists and urban health specialists argue that the seasonal fluctuation of children's blood lead levels seen in industrial cities like Detroit indicate that kids are exposed to lead from contaminated soil that turns into airborne dust in the summertime.

Boston was mentioned in the article, so I'm especially alarmed at this one. I'm glad I don't have a kid...I'd be terrified about him or her breathing the air during summer!

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It's Friday, yay.

My kind of people

Of course, the first thing the HR guy did when he came to greet me was shake my hand.



(Later, he apologized for not shaking my hand as I was leaving, because he was feeling sick. I told him it was too late, so he offered me some hand sanitizer.)

Holy crap and a half

Have you guys heard about Cordyceps? It's a parasitic fungus that invades insects, hijacks their brain, and then uses their bodies to reproduce. It's freaky as hell, and yet I can't look away:

(See also.)

Don't be lulled into a false sense of security that something like this can't happen to you just because you're not an insect. Humans too can be invaded and have their brains hijacked (long article, but totally worth a read).

All Men are Mortal, and All Fruit Flies Are Boozers

Well, I'm sorry to say I haven't particularly cheered up as of late...I even flew myself all the way to California in the hopes that a change of pace (and some friend time) would make me feel better, and I continued to mope while I was there because everything is terrible and we're all gonna die and I'm gonna die alone and I am the worst. But I have been doing a lot of thinking about how to make life a little more enjoyable and I guess a good start is some edjumucation. I do like learning me some new things! Like these random tidbits I've stumbled across lately:

• Fruit flies seek fermenting fruit to keep wasps away.
• There is a contest for Oddest Book Title, and one of the books on the shortlist this year is God's Doodle, and I'll let you click on that link to find out what "God's doodle" is.
• Crying in space is hard to do.
• Thomas Edison invented LOLCats?
• The world is in need of portable fish authenticity tests...beware your sushi!
• Oh god, prairie dogs have the black death.
• Dolphins might call each other by name. Amazing.
• Holy moly look at these giant bird nests! I wouldn't want to stand under any of those...
• Note to self: do not store your gun magazine (should you ever be in possession of one) in the oven.
• OMG the world's soil is running out.
• And the pièce de résistance: Can you eat your own poop? Spoiler alert: Yep. Second spoiler alert: there is a word meaning "eating poop" and this word is "coprophagy." 

In some more existential crisis news, I recently read All Men are Mortal, by Simon de Beauvoir. It was an odd book that I don't particularly recommend, but I mention it because it was more or less a meditation on immortality, and therefore on mortality, and on what makes a life meaningful. The main message I took from the novel is that individual lives are relatively meaningless and can make little impact (even immortal ones) and in the aggregate humans are constantly repeating their errors...but at least humans are mortal and get to die. So let this serve as a note to self: life might be pointless, but at least you'll die some day!

And hey look, this is topical:

As is this (from one of my favorite new (to me) blogs).

And this:

Via

Finally, to finish this long ramble, I can't wait to teach my nephew about what goats actually sound like:


1:24 is obviously the best part of this compilation.

Existential Crisis

Something I've been pondering lately: How, in the absence of religion, partner, kids, or any particular desire to do community service, does one add meaning or purpose to ones life? I've been feeling very purposeless recently, and it's not good for my mental health. All day every day, all I do is wonder: what is the point of anything (or everything)? Am I just supposed to get up, go to work, go home, sleep, repeat...forever?* I can't see any particular alternative at the moment.

Speaking of existential crisis, this guy at Oxford thinks we are underestimating the risk of humanity's self-destruction. He also says a lot of stuff I don't fully understand. But I understood this:

Q: What technology, or potential technology, worries you the most?

A: I can mention a few. In the nearer term I think various developments in biotechnology and synthetic biology are quite disconcerting. We are gaining the ability to create designer pathogens and there are these blueprints of various disease organisms that are in the public domain---you can download the gene sequence for smallpox or the 1918 flu virus from the Internet. So far the ordinary person will only have a digital representation of it on their computer screen, but we're also developing better and better DNA synthesis machines, which are machines that can take one of these digital blueprints as an input, and then print out the actual RNA string or DNA string. Soon they will become powerful enough that they can actually print out these kinds of viruses. So already there you have a kind of predictable risk, and then once you can start modifying these organisms in certain kinds of ways, there is a whole additional frontier of danger that you can foresee.

In the longer run, I think artificial intelligence---once it gains human and then superhuman capabilities---will present us with a major risk area. There are also different kinds of population control that worry me, things like surveillance and psychological manipulation pharmaceuticals.

Oh crap, Wikipedia says existential crises are incurable.

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*Except today, when I get up, go to work, and then go downtown to throw balls at people in a confined space. Dodgeball is great for getting the aggression out! Rawr!

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!

***

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.

Nobody rages anymore

Via

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Oh...And merry belated Christmas.

Everything you've never wanted to know about the Mayan Apocalypse

Because I have a blog entitled "We're All Gonna Die," however intermittently-active said blog might be, many people have asked me whether I believe the Mayan Apocalypse will happen this Friday. The short answer is "Hell no, I'm no dummy. I think we're all gonna die as a result of man-made errors, not cosmic coincidences. (Duh.)" The long answer is that I actually know very little about the so-called "Mayan Apocalypse" aside from the fact (is it a fact?) that the Mayan calendar allegedly ends on December 21, 2012, and that some people believe that this will trigger (or coincide) with some kind of cataclysmic and/or cosmic event. So my response is typically, "Uh no; our calendar ends every December 31, and so far that hasn't caused any apocalypse." Which seemed clever and pithy to me (if I do say so myself) until I read that NASA is using the same reasoning to dissuade people from believing in the impending Doomsday. After I learned that, my reasoning seemed more on the rocket scientist level. (Fortunately, I just read that NASA thing today, so I haven't let my (supposed) genius go to my head for too long.)

In any case, I hoped to write a big ol' blog entry about why people believe that the world is going to end tomorrow, and what specifically is supposed to happen at the end, but the more I look into the issue, the less sense everything makes. There's not even one narrative that explains everything; it's all a mish mosh of paranoia. What seems clear is that (1) the Mayans most certainly did not believe the end of their calendar cycle was the end of the world (it's just the start of a new cycle...), and (2) all the prophecies that do foretell the end of the world are so insane as to test the limits of credulity, even among the gullible.* Among the various things that people believe will happen include a planet called Nibiru or Planet X or Eris approaching the Earth, threatening widespread destruction; a NASA conspiracy to cover it up; the Earth passing through a "galactic synchronization beam" (triggering what?); and more. And more.**) Assuming NASA isn't just trying to cover up the planet hurtling towards us, the following video makes a decent (if unimaginative) case for cutting the crap already. (My favorite part is when they talk about all the scientists discussing the doomsday on a Google hangout.)

So that's about all I have to say about that.

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Disappointed that tomorrow isn't the end of the world? Have no fear. Gawker offers some hope for us all:

So if the world's not ending tomorrow, when will it end?

• If we can slow global warming enough, we'll get another Ice Age in about 50,000 years.
• By 500,000 years from now we'll most likely have been hit by a meteor with a diameter of 1 kilometer or more.
• Within a million years we're likely to see a supervolcanic eruption of about 113 million cubic feet of magma.
• In 100 million years we will probably have been hit by a meteorite the size of that which triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs.
• By 800 million years from now the carbon cycle will have been disrupted, lowering carbon dioxide levels to a point at which multicellular life is no longer sustainable.
• In a billion years the oceans will have evaporated.
• And in 7.9 billion years the sun will expand to 256 times its current size and likely destroy the earth.

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*NOT EVEN NORTH KOREA BELIEVES THIS SHIT.***
**Mental Floss lists the following possibilities for what might allegedly happen tomorrow [Via LiveScience]:

We’ll be toasted by a massive solar storm; Earth’s magnetic poles will flip-flop catastrophically; Planet X (a non-existent “rogue planet”) will smash into us; the planets will align in a way that ruins everything...or there will be some kind of massive global blackout, possibly due to an unprecedented alignment of Earth and Sun.

***Allegedly. In cursory searching I could find no other source to confirm this allegation.