Page 2: The Distillery

• Mercury shows hollows — irregularly shaped, flat-floored depressions — on the southwestern peak ring of the Scarlatti basin.  They’re only a few tens of metres deep and no more than a kilometre in diameter.  But what caused them?  Although a number of small impact craters surround the hollows, there are few or none in the hollows themselves, indicating they’re young.  Is there something in the rocks that can’t stand up to the punishing environment on Mercury’s surface and is finally dissipating in a sublimation-like process?  If that’s so, why now?  Mercury has proven to have more volatiles — elements with lower boiling points than expected [such as potassium (K), chlorine (Cl) and sulphur (S)] than had been anticipated.  Their presence surprises scientists.
• The pair of bright star-like features in the upper panel are not stars at all, but the earth and the moon.  Messenger was at a distance of 98 million kilometres (61 million miles) from home when the picture was taken.  The computer-generated image in the lower left shows how the earth appeared from Mercury at the time (data received 19 July 2013).  Much of the Americas, all of Europe and Africa, the Middle East, and much of Asia were visible.
• Blitzars, which last only about a millisecond, have been detected by telescopes since about 2001 and have been heard 10 times since.  They produce more energy in a millisecond than the sun does in a million years, and their single, intense, flash of radio waves may possibly be being created when a neutron star severs from its magnetic field as it collapses into a black hole.  However, a new study has found that the bursts line up in a way that is not explained by existing physics.  Scientists tried to work out how far the bursts have travelled through space to get to us, using dispersion measures that look at how these radio waves get scattered as they travel through space (the higher the dispersion measure, the further the waves are thought to have travelled).  All 10 bursts detected thus far have dispersion measures that line up as multiples of a single number: 187.5.  The chances of them doing so are 5 in 10,000 study scientists claim.  The source appears to be a few billion light years away.  Is this a beacon?

• The Troll Wall (Norwegian: Trollveggen) is part of the mountain massif Trolltindene in the Romsdalen valley on the Norwegian west coast.  The Troll Wall is the tallest vertical rock face in Europe, about 1,100 metres (3,600 feet) from its base to the summit of its highest point.  The rock is generally loose, and rockfall is the norm on this north-facing big wall.  There was a series of large rockfalls on the wall in September 1998, radically changing the character of several climbing routes.  The Troll Wall had been a prestigious goal for climbers and jumpers alike due to its accessibility until Carl Boenish, the “father” of BASE jumping, was killed in 1984 shortly after setting the world record for the highest BASE jump in history. BASE jumping from Troll Wall has been illegal since 1986.
• Preikestolen is also called Preacher’s Pulpit or Pulpit Rock; it’s a famous tourist attraction in Forsand, Ryfylke, Norway.  It consists of a steep cliff which rises 604 metres (1,982 feet) above Lysefjorden, opposite the Kjerag plateau.  It has an almost-flat top of approximately 25 × 25 metres (82 × 82 feet).  A round-trip hike to Preikestolen from the closest car park takes about 3–4 hours for someone of average fitness.  The walk isn’t recommended in winter and spring when there’s snow and ice, which can make the track slippery.  Also, see that large crack across it?  At some point (inspectors say no time soon), the rock will fall away.
• Hammerfest municipality is named after the town (established 1789), which was named after an old anchorage.  The first element of the name is hammer, referring to a number of large rocks, good for mooring boats, called Hamran (Old Norse: Hamarr meaning “steep mountainside”).  The Hamran were covered up with soil when the land was reclaimed during the early post-war years.  The last element of the name is fest, from Old Norse festr which means “fastening” (for boats).

• Trondheim is the third most populous municipality in Norway.  The city is dominated by technology-oriented institutions.  The original settlement was founded in 997 as a trading post, and served as capital of Norway during the Viking Age until 1217.  In ancient times, the Kings of Norway were hailed (akin to crowned) at Øretinget in Trondheim (the “place at the mouth of the river Nidelva for the assembly of all free men”).  Nidaros was the official name of the city for a brief period from January 1930 until March 1931 (meant to reaffirm the city’s link with its glorious past), despite the fact that a 1928 referendum on the city’s name resulted in 17,163 votes in favour of Trondhjem and only 1,508 votes in favour of Nidaros.  Public outrage, even taking the form of riots, forced a change back to the medieval city name Trondheim.
• Taken from Fløyen, one of the 7 mountains of Bergen (and the easiest to scale, thanks to the funicular, the Fløibanen.
• Bryggen (Norwegian for Wharf) is a series of Hanseatic commercial buildings lining the eastern side of the fjord coming into Bergen.  Bryggen has (since 1979) been on the UNESCO list for World Cultural Heritage sites.  The city of Bergen was founded around 1070.  About 1360 a trading post of the Hanseatic League was established there, which became the centre of the Hanseatic commercial activities in Norway.  Today, Bryggen houses museums, shops, restaurants and pubs.  Parts of Bryggen were destroyed in a fire in 1702 and again in 1955.  Still, much remains.

• This view of Wellington has been modified to show the shoreline as it was before the Haowhenua earthquake, probably in the 15th century.  At that time, Miramar Peninsula was the island of Motukairangi.  The present-day coastline is marked by a dotted line.  There are signs all over town showing where the coastline used to be and earth movement has supplied Wellington with lots more waterfront.  (Chris Maclean, “Wellington region – Creation stories and landscape”, Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 14 November 2012.)
• New Zealand lies in the path of the roaring forties – the prevailing westerly winds – and Wellington is one of the windiest places in NZ.  This is due to its position on the edge of Cook Strait, the only major gap between the mountainous ridges running the length of the two main islands.  As winds are funnelled through the passage they become faster and stronger, especially on the northern (Wellington) side of the strait.  Wellingtonians learn to live with the wind, some claiming they like it.  One positive effect is that air pollution is rarely a problem.  (From Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, Reference: F T W Harris, “Greater Cook Strait: form and flow”; Wellington: DSIR Marine and Freshwater, 1990.) Records show that in one year, northerlies and northwesterlies blew for 61% of the time and southerlies for 28%.  Only 11% of days were calm.  Winds of more than 60 kilometres-per-hour blew on 173 days a year.  [In Comstock, Texas – where I have also lived – there are more than 100 days per year when the temperature exceeds 100°F (38°C).  I prefer wind.]
• If the vehicle in the lower left of this photo from 1932 is looking for a parking space on the Morristown Green, it may be a lengthy search.  One-way traffic around the Green was instituted only 6 years before this photo was taken.  The Morristown Green has a long and storied history, having served at various times as a military training ground and site for public executions before the 2½-acre area became the centre for commercial and civic activities in the county seat.  [It’s full of squirrels and has a tribute to the Civil War and flowers and shaded benches and sometimes I miss it.]

• Sprawling Mexico City rolls across the landscape, displacing every scrap of natural habitat.  The Mexican capital’s sprawling suburbs are home to 20 million souls with an astounding 25,400 people per square mile in the city.  Homes simply follow the contours of the earth.  It’s also extremely polluted.  Though smog has been drastically reduced in recent decades, an orangish fog often stands just above the sprawling city around the mountain peaks that surround it.
• This is a glimpse of industrial livestock production in Brazil.  The cattle industry in Brazil is the economic activity that occupies the largest land expansion.  Brazil has the second largest herd in the world, only surpassed by India.  Cattle are concentrated in the Legal Amazon and Cerrado grasslands regions, and have resulted in considerable biodiversity loss, deforestation and water pollution.
• Sometimes called the Brazil of the North, Canada hasn’t been kind to its native forests as seen by clear-cut logging on Vancouver Island.  Outside of Victoria, Vancouver Island’s economy is largely dominated by the forestry industry.  Many of the logging operations are for export, although, historically, were for sawn lumber and pulp and paper operations.  Recently, rotations are much shorter than the historical 80 years.  Logging operations involving old-growth forests such as those found in Clayoquot Sound are controversial and have gained international attention through the efforts of activists and environmental organisations.  Another source of controversy all over the Island are logging operations occurring in community watersheds.  This is happening for two primary reasons: old-growth forests are nearly all cut, and communities have little recourse to protect their watersheds because the province of British Columbia has no legislation giving communities that right.

• Indonesian surfer Dede Surinaya catches a wave in a remote but garbage-covered bay on Java, Indonesia, the world’s most populated island.  Heavy pollution of river water by household and industrial waste in West Java is threatening the health of at least 5 million people living on the riverbanks.  Poor sanitation and hygiene cause 50,000 deaths annually in Indonesia, with untreated sewage resulting in over 6 million tons of human waste released.
• Depleting oil fields are yet another symptom of ecological overshoot as seen at the Kern River Oil Field in California.  This view is from Panorama Park in Bakersfield, from atop the bluff across the river.  This is the most densely developed oilfield in California, and the 5th-largest producer (as of 2006) in the US.
• Slum-dwelling residents of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, face bleak living conditions in the western hemisphere’s poorest country.  The city’s layout is similar to that of an amphitheatre; commercial districts are near the water, while residential neighbourhoods are located on the hills above.  Its population is difficult to ascertain due to the rapid growth of slums in the hillsides above the city; however, recent estimates place the metropolitan area’s population at around 3.7 million, nearly half of the country’s national population.

• As far as the eye can see, a gigantic mosaic of 30,000 greenhouses cover the desert landscape in San Augustin near Almería, Andalusia, Spain.  Constructed mostly with plastic, these produce tonnes of fruits and vegetables, more than 70% of which is exported to the rest of Europe.  An area so arid and dusty that it provided the backdrop for spaghetti westerns, Almería has made a fortune by covering itself with a canopy of transparent plastic.  Drip irrigation may cut waste, but aquifers are still drying up.  Some are so full of intruding seawater that some crops can no longer be grown.  As problems arise farmers seek scientific fixes.  And soon, some greenhouses won’t need rainwater: a desalination plant, turning Mediterranean seawater into freshwater, is set to rescue them.
• This is a former old-growth forest, which was levelled for reservoir development in the Willamette National Forest in Oregon.  The US forest service estimated that the trees were more than 700 years old.  There are 5 reservoirs within the Willamette National Forest, each involving the clear-cutting of a number of trees.  I don’t know for which reservoir this cutting was done (maybe even an upcoming 6th?).
• There’s no room for nature, as the entire landscape is devoted to crop production in rural China, a vital industry employing over 300 million farmers.  China ranks first in worldwide farm output and, although accounting for only 10% of arable land worldwide, it produces food for 20% of the world.

• In Jiangsu (China), a series of similar houses have a playground in the middle.  This one is located in the city of Jiangyin.
• Lìjiāng is a prefecture-level city in the northwest of Yunnan province, People’s Republic of China.  Lijiang is famous for its UNESCO Heritage Site, the Old Town of Lijiang.  In ancient times, the Baisha Old Town used to be the centre of silk embroidery in the southwest of China and the most important place of the Ancient Southern Silk Road, also called the Ancient Tea and Horse Road or Ancient Tea Route.  The Ancient Southern Silk Road started from Burma, crossed Lijiang, Shangri-La County, Tibet, journeyed through Iran, the Fertile Crescent, and ultimately to the Mediterranean Sea.  Naxi women were well known for their hand-made embroidery before 1972 during the Great Cultural Revolution.  The most famous Naxi masters were arrested and put in jail (where many died) during the Cultural Revolution because when they were young they did hand-made embroidery only for the Naxi Emperors.  (And not everyone else?  Clearly an offence warranting capital punishment!)
• Flamingos gather on the eastern side of Lake Bogoria, Kenya.  Enough lesser flamingos have arrived here to create a pink carpet.  Flamingos avoid the hot springs found primarily on the west side of the lake.  (It can make the east side a bit crowded, however.)

• Uzungöl (English: Long Lake) is situated to the south of the city of Trabzon, located in the Black Sea region on the historical Silk Road, a melting pot of religions, languages and culture for centuries.  (There are a lot of mosques and monasteries nearby.)  The water is a natural mineral water said to be healing.  Trabzon means “table” in ancient Greek.  Unfortunately, this town was a major Armenian extermination centre during the Armenian Genocide, as well as a location of the subsequent trials.  Many of the Armenian victims (an estimated 50,000) were taken out into the Black Sea in boats that were capsized while 5,000 others were systematically burned in groups.
• Geiranger is a small tourist village in the Sunnmøre region of the western part of Norway.  The Geirangerfjord area has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Sadly, it’s under constant threat from the mountain Åkerneset, which could erode into the fjord.  A collapse may cause a tsunami that would destroy the downtown area.  (This isn’t likely to happen soon, though it’s possible.)
• This is an artificial pond (called Aoi ike, meaning Blue Pond) created incidentally outside the Japanese hot spring town of Shirogane Onsen, where a dam was erected to protect the region from mudflows that might occur should the nearby mountain volcano, Mount Tokachidake, erupt.  The blue colour is attributed to the presence of aluminium hydroxide in the water that reflects the shorter wavelength blue light the same way the earth’s atmosphere does.  The colour of the water can change depending on the viewing angle and time of day.  When removed from the pond, the water appears colourless.

• Geographically, Botswana is flat, with up to 70% of its territory being the Kalahari Desert.  It’s about the size of France, yet is one of the most sparsely populated nations in the world.  Around 10% of the population lives in the capital and largest city, Gaborone.  Environmentalists report that the Okavango Delta is drying up due to increased grazing of livestock.  This delta is one of the major semi-forested wetlands in Botswana and one of the largest inland deltas in the world; it’s a crucial ecosystem to the survival of many animals.  Despite political stability and relative socio-economic prosperity, the country has been among the hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, with around a quarter of the population estimated to be infected.
• A small eye dropper or drinking straw can be used to produce useable droplets.  You can even use electronically-timed solenoid valves to improve your success rate.  Food colouring is a simple way to dye water to produce colourful photographs.  A coloured card or piece of acrylic can add background colour.  Electronic timing and trigger systems are available that remove a lot of the difficulties of getting good water-droplet images.  Infrared trigger beams can control water solenoid valves and camera and flash guns.  Still, it takes patience and imagination.  The flash duration is around 1/20,000-1/30,000 of a second (if you dial the power down); it’s flash duration that freezes the movement of the droplets, NOT the shutter speed of your camera.
• Unlike a double rainbow that consists of two separate and concentric rainbow arcs, the very rare twinned rainbow appears as two rainbow arcs that split from a single base.  The colours in the second bow, rather than reversing as in a double rainbow, appear in the same order as the primary rainbow.  It is sometimes even observed in combination with a secondary rainbow.  The cause of a twinned rainbow is the combination of different sizes of water drops falling from the sky.  Due to air resistance, raindrops flatten as they fall, and flattening is more prominent in larger water drops.  When two rain showers with different-sized raindrops combine, they each produce slightly different rainbows which may combine and form a twinned rainbow.  This rainbow set is extremely rare: twinned double rainbows over New York’s Long Island.  And only one person (of the millions with mobile phones who live in the area) appears to have had the idea to photograph it.  Just then, her train arrived, so she only got a single shot.

• Warmer global temperatures will make it tougher for planes to take off, tightening restrictions on just how much luggage or how many people can come aboard.  Higher temperatures make air less dense, reducing the lift force on planes’ wings.  Because heavier planes are harder to speed up, they’ll need more runway distance to reach minimum take-off speed in warmer weather.  But when runways aren’t long enough, those flights will need to reduce loads.  To compensate, airlines will have to reduce the number of passengers or the amount of cargo unless the aviation industry lengthens runways or designs more aerodynamic planes.
• Travel back through time aboard the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad with the 1916 Baldwin 2-8-0 “Mountain Thunder”.  You’ll climb through spectacular scenery in the Allegheny Mountains in restored early 20th century rolling stock on a 32-mile round-trip between Cumberland and Frostburg.  More than 300 years of American history are tied together by a ribbon of steel.  The railroad offers coach and first class service, as well as reserved caboose rides.  There are also murder mystery excursions and special seasonal trips.
• Yerevan is the capital and largest city of Armenia and one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities (since the 8th century BC).  Legend has it that it was named by Noah (Mount Ararat overlooks the city).  Yerevan became the capital of the First Republic of Armenia after thousands of survivors of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire settled in the area.  The first church in Yerevan, the church of St Peter and Paul, was built in the 5th century.  Unfortunately, this church was demolished in 1931 to make room for a cinema hall, the Moscow Cinema (although a church from the 6th century still remains).  Silvard Atajyan, 103, sits at home in Yerevan on 20 April 2015.  Now 103 years old, she still remembers vividly when French soldiers saved her, her sister, and their parents from the mass killings by the Ottoman Turks.  (Should I live to be 103, I want to look as good as she does.)

• This looks like it was fun to make.  It’s called 5 mètres 80 — 5½ minutes long and may be your only chance to watch giraffes dive.
• Rambo is an octopus trained to use a camera (she’s now called an octographer).  For $2, she’ll take your photo (if she has time) when you visit Kelly Tarleton’s Sea Life Aquarium in Auckland.  (You won’t be charged if a tentacle gets in front of the lens.)
• An animal behaviourist taught her to use the camera after only 3 tries as part of an enrichment programme for this intelligent (but unfortunately short-lived) creature.  The campaign was sponsored by Sony to show how durable their underwater camera is.  (Earlier, an octopus in the neuroscience lab at Middlebury College had turned a GoPro camera on a photographer and snapped the photographer’s photo after a camera had been placed in the octopus’s tank — but then afterward the octopus tried to eat it).

• Photographer Cameron Bloom’s son Noah found a baby magpie chick alone in the wild near their Newport, NSW home.  The family decided to raise her themselves.  They named her Penguin.  Penguin has the freedom to fly out into the Australian wilderness but she always comes back.
• Cameron said Penguin also likes to play games such as catch, enjoys singing, and even seems to mimic humans on demand.  “If you flap your arms like wings — she’ll flap her wings,” he said.  “She spends a fair bit of time cruising inside the house, picking up the kids’ scraps and playing games.  She’s pretty domesticated.”  Here, she helps Oli Bloom brush his teeth.
• Penguin has brought friends into the house at times.  “A few months ago there was another baby magpie, a local one.  She started playing with it and it came into the house,” Mr Bloom said.  “Penguin and this one were just … talking and carrying on together.  It was really cool.  She’ll make her own family one day.”

• Ascidiacea (commonly known as sea squirt) is a class in the Tunicata subphylum of sac-like marine invertebrate filter feeders.  These are characterised by a tough outer “tunic” made of the polysaccharide tunicin, as compared to other tunicates which are less rigid.  They’re found all over the world, usually in shallow water with salinities over 2.5%.  While other subphyla swim freely like plankton, sea squirts are sessile animals: they remain firmly attached to objects like rocks and shells.  They reproduce both asexually and sexually and colonies can survive for decades.  The sea pineapple (which I think is the type shown) is cultivated in Japan for food.  When eaten raw, they’ve been described as tasting like “rubber dipped in ammonia” (attributed to an unsaturated alcohol called cynthiaol), so if you ever get to try one, make sure it’s cooked.
• From a fœtal monkey to a cat’s uterus during pregnancy, Michael Frank’s photographs document historical dissections featured at the Royal Veterinary College London.  Each of the specimens is stored in a formalin pot, preserving its intricate structure in incredible detail.  To create the images, the photographer used carefully constructed lighting on the pots to achieve a sense of the fragility of the membrane or tissue within.
• Female sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) swim with favoured companions and form long-term family allegiances.  They raise their young in communal family groups of about a dozen related females, but mapping their social lives has been challenging.  Whales spend 60% of their lives hunting squid hundreds of metres below the waves and thus can be watched interacting for only a few minutes when they surface to breathe.  But a multiyear study has created a more detailed map of their social networks.  For 5 years, scientists followed 9 families along the west coast of the Caribbean island of Dominica and mapped social relationships by noting which females spent the most time together at the surface between dives.  As expected, they mostly preferred family members, but within families they frequently swam with the same sister, auntie, or aged granny.  Three pairs of families mingled frequently over the years to share babysitting duty.  Such allegiances can last more than a decade.  Sperm whale families may be similar to the matriarchal clans of elephants, which also form long-lasting family bonds.  Further research may determine whether whales use signature songs to locate their best friends.

Erik Johansson, a Swedish photographer, artist, and Photoshop expert living in Berlin, takes mundane scenarios, including houses, cars, and streets and transforms them into optical illusions. His work is clever and full of subtlety. One photo can consist of 100s of different images merged into one, yet the idea is for it to look like it was snapped by a camera. He cites Rene Magritte, Salvador Dali and M C Escher as his artistic influences. Each image can take anywhere from a few weeks to years to create. He says each idea starts with a sketch and if he thinks it’s good enough he’ll start planning how to do it. The final part is putting the photos together. This alone takes him anything from a few days to several weeks.
 

Web designer Alan Lawrence has released a series of pictures that appear to show his son flying.  Wil Lawrence was born in October 2013 with Down syndrome.  On learning of his son’s condition, Mr Lawrence admits that he felt scared and unsure of what to expect from the future.  Now, 17 months later, the dad of 5 says his youngest son “has helped our family grow in ways we didn’t realise we needed”.  Mr Lawrence started making pictures of his son appearing to fly through the air to show that Wil isn’t limited by his condition.  He holds Wil in mid-air for the photos, then edits himself out of the frame using Photoshop.  “We want to show the world that you can have a happy life with a child with Down syndrome,” he said.  “He helps us slow down and find the joy in life.”  Mr Lawrence has set up a Kickstarter page to raise money for a series of calendars featuring the pictures.  Proceeds from sales will be donated to Down syndrome foundations.
 

• As Type 45 destroyer HMS Dragon patrols the Eastern Mediterranean, her Mk8 Lynx helicopter breathes fire into the sunset sky with 60 infrared countermeasure decoy flares as part of a day-into-night flying serial sortie.
• A coalition led by Saudi Arabia has ended a bombing campaign to target Houthi rebels, which has lasted almost a month.  The announcement comes after two air strikes in Yemen killed at least 40 people, most of whom were civilians (medical sources on the scene said).
• Smoke rises during an air strike on an army weapons depot on a mountain overlooking Yemen’s capital Sanaa, 20 April 2015.

• Genes from your father are more dominant than those inherited from your mother, new research has shown.  All mammals are likely to use the majority of genetic material passed down from males, even if offspring look and act more like the mother, according to the study on lab mice by University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine.
• The Ruriden columbarium, operated by the Koukokuji Buddhist Temple in Tokyo, is as futuristic as the capital of Japan itself.  Believe it or not, this is a cemetery.  The Ruriden is home to 2,046 small altars, with glass Buddha statues that correspond to drawers storing the ashes of the deceased.  People can visit their beloved lost ones with the help of a smart card which grants access to the building and lights up their corresponding statue.  The Ruriden took two years to build and the ashes are stored here for 33 years before being buried below-ground.  Currently 600 altars are in use—and another 300 are reserved.
• A new virus has been discovered, but rather than giving you a sore throat, it affects a very different part of the body.  According to US scientists, the algae virus affects the human brain, and can impair cognitive functions.  Scientists are basically saying there’s something we can catch that will make us a bit stupid.

A typical roll of toilet tissue has 400 sheets.  The distance to the sun is 400 times the distance to the moon.  Thus, if you were to unroll an entire roll of tissue, the length of one tissue would represent the distance from the earth to the moon, and the whole roll would span from the earth to the sun.  Venus would be around tissue number 135 and Mercury about tissue number 260.

Let’s say this particular roll has a little extra tissue — 424 sheets.  In 1994, the European Space Agency’s Hipparcos satellite precisely measured the distance to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun.  At 4.22 light-years, Proxima is 2/10 of a light-year closer than Alpha Centauri, a famous bright star visible from the southern hemisphere.  If we assign a distance of one 1/100th of a light-year to the length of a single sheet of tissue, the whole roll is almost exactly the correct length to reach Proxima.  If the sun is a dot marked at the beginning edge of the first sheet, then Pluto, the most distant planet, is about 5 millimetres away.  Voyager 2, launched way back in 1977 and the most remote spacecraft from the earth, is less than 12 millimetres from the sun.  It won’t reach the other side of the first tissue until the year 2181.

Suppose we increase the scale by 100.  Now one sheet = one light-year.  Proxima Centauri is on tissue 4.  At the end of the roll is Polaris, the North Star, slightly more than 400 light-years from the sun (and the earth).

Increasing the scale by 10 this time, one sheet now equals 10 light-years.  Proxima Centauri is less than halfway along the first sheet of tissue.  At the end of the roll, 4,000 light-years distant, is the next spiral arm of the Milky Way, our home galaxy.  You can sometimes see this spiral arm as a glowing band in the night sky.

We’re not through yet.  Let’s make the length of each tissue 100,000 light-years.  Now the entire 90,000-light-year-wide Milky Way fits on one tissue.  The Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest large galaxy similar to the Milky Way, doesn’t come until tissue number 24.  At the end of the roll is M87, the central giant galaxy in the Virgo supercluster of galaxies.  At 45 million light-years from us, it’s the nearest supercluster.

One final expansion: Each tissue sheet is now 30 million light-years long, big enough to hold most of the Virgo supercluster’s 10,000 galaxies in total.  At the end of the roll are the most distant galaxies known, 12-13 billion light-years from our solar system.  We can’t go much farther, because we encounter the energy wall emitted long, long ago by the Big Bang creation of the universe.  But that’s for another time. (by Terence Dickinson)

In the 50s, people in one region of Borneo were troubled by malaria.  To save lives, the World Health Organization (WHO) decided to intervene, drastically reducing the disease-causing mosquito population by spraying the insecticide DDT over the area.  However, WHO failed to appreciate the full scope of their actions.  DDT not only successfully killed mosquitoes — it also attacked a parasitic wasp population which had kept in check thatch-eating caterpillars.  With the accidental removal of the wasps, the caterpillars flourished, and soon hut roofs started falling in all over the place.

As if that weren’t enough the DDT-poisoned insects were eaten by geckoes.  The biological half-life of DDT is about 8-years, so it stays in the geckoes’ systems for a long time.  The DDT-laden geckoes were eaten by the local cat population.  The cats didn’t fare well after that.  With few cats remaining, rats took over, leading to increased typhus and plague in rural Borneo.

By now the cure had become worse than the initial disease, so the WHO did what seemed to be the right thing: they parachuted live cats into Borneo.  This event was known as Operation Cat Drop.

By considering only the straightforward, first-level relationship between mosquitoes as carriers of malaria and humans as recipients of malaria, the WHO had unrealistically assumed that this relationship could be acted upon independently of any other variables.  But in the real world, this is almost never true.  Things did eventually return to normal (including malaria as a year-round problem in Borneo’s rural areas), but it took years.

A dinner speaker is in such a hurry to get to his engagement that when he arrives and sits down at the head table, he suddenly realises he forgot his false teeth.  Turning to the man next to him he says, “Oh, no! I’ve forgotten my teeth!”

The man says, “No problem.”  With that he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pair of false teeth.  “Try these.”

The speaker tries them.  “Too loose,” he says.

The man then says, “I have another pair … try these.”

The speaker tries them and responds, “Too tight.”

The man is not taken aback at all.  “I have one more pair of false teeth … try them.”

The speaker says, “They fit perfectly!”  With that he eats his meal then gives his address.  After the dinner meeting is over, the speaker goes over to talk to the man who had helped him.  “I want to thank you for coming to my aid.  Where is your office?  I’ve been looking for a good dentist.”

The man replies, “I’m not a dentist … I’m an undertaker.”