Ingenial

A geologist proposed dropping munitions into Japan’s volcanic craters to trigger eruptions and hasten “Japan’s unconditional surrender.” Via pinktentacle

You might call it an act of God. A severe drought in Venezuela has exposed a church—pictured in 2008 (left) and on February 21, 2010—that had been inundated when a hydroelectric dam was built in 1985.

The 82-foot-tall (25-meter-tall) church and the Andean town of Potosi (see map) were flooded to establish the Uribante-Caparo water reservoir to power the plant, which is currently operating at just 7 percent of its capacity, according to the Reuters service. (Get news on the global water crisis.)

The church is now an ominous symbol of energy shortages in the country, which gets around 68 percent of its power from hydroelectricity, Reuters reported. The droughts spurred Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to declare an energy emergency in February.

National Geographic.

Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747…but here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times.

In the story of Robert Falcon Scott’s 1911 expedition to the South Pole, comes an astonishing lecture on scurvy by one of the expedition’s doctors:

Atkinson inclined to Almroth Wright’s theory that scurvy is due to an acid intoxication of the blood caused by bacteria…
There was little scurvy in Nelson’s days; but the reason is not clear, since, according to modern research, lime-juice only helps to prevent it. We had, at Cape Evans, a salt of sodium to be used to alkalize the blood as an experiment, if necessity arose. Darkness, cold, and hard work are in Atkinson’s opinion important causes of scurvy.

Except for the nature of vitamin C, eighteenth century physicians knew this too. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another.

Scott’s Polar ration: 450g biscuit, 340 grams pemmican, 85g sugar, 57g butter, 24g tea, 16g cocoa. This ration contains about 4500 calories (sledging requires 6500) and no vitamin C.

In the course of writing this essay, I was tempted many times to pick a villain. Maybe the perfectly named Almroth Wright, who threw his considerable medical reputation behind the ptomaine theory and so delayed the proper re-understanding of scurvy for many years. Or the nameless Admiralty flunkie who helped his career by championing the switch to West Indian limes. Or even poor Scott himself, sermonizing about the virtues of scientific progress while never conducting a proper experiment, taking dreadful risks, and showing a most unscientific reliance on pure grit to get his men out of any difficulty.

But the villain here is just good old human ignorance, that master of disguise. We tend to think that knowledge, once acquired, is something permanent. Instead, even holding on to it requires constant, careful effort.

Read the full article by Maciej Ceg?owski at IdleWords.com