Near as I can tell, we are all going to die a slow incomprehensible radioactive death relatively soon now. Or we're not.
Reports are flooding in from around the world that the Fukushima meltdown was one of the worst disasters in mankind's short history, a game-changing horror of unimaginable scope and psychological timbre that will wreak emotional and environmental havoc for years, decades and even millennia to come, spreading radioactive particles over thousands of square miles of Japan and beyond.
What's more, none of that is really true, the disaster isn't really all that bad, the radiation levels are relatively low and Japan is feeling much better already, thanks for asking.
The Fukushima meltdown is easily as terrible as 1979's Three Mile Island, which, it turns out, wasn't all that bad, depending on who you don't care enough to ask. Fukushima is probably the second worst disaster of its kind in history, even though no one really knows how to measure the full extent of these things so that's probably false as well, although we do know it's not as bad as Chernobyl because nothing could ever really be that devastating ever again, except for the fact that it totally could.
What are you doing about all of it? Word has it if you're not popping iodine pills and seaweed and -- oh yes -- also stocking up on handguns, canned ravioli and a month's worth of fresh water for the next big quake, well, you clearly didn't read Jim Berkland's warnings, that old rogue USGS scientist who said the Japan quake was just the beginning, was merely the trigger for a huge chain reaction blasting through the Ring of Fire, and various forces both tidal and lunar are right now colliding and colluding to slam the living hell out of Northern California. Are you prepared?
You'd better be. Jim says a massive, devastating quake could quite nearly wipe us out, and he predicts it's almost certainly coming -- whoops, oh dear -- last week, right around the time of the supermoon, which was also supposed to trigger all sorts of ungodly global crisis but turned out to be nothing more than a nice time to gaze upwards and howl and then sip some wine and have sex. Oh well.
Whom do you want to believe? What vague and indeterminate misinformation do you want to poison your heart like the waves and specks of deadly low-level radiation currently not heading out way over 6,000 miles of ocean in the form of mist and seagulls and furious dolphins, soiled Toyota Corollas and shrill Fox News idiocy that makes you embarrassed to be alive in the modern world?
This just in: We are very much in serious danger, but the liberal media and various sinister governments are covering it all up to prevent an all-out panic. Unless we're not, and they aren't, because that would be completely stupid, and also impossible.
Does the truth actually matter? After all, isn't Japan both a literal and a karmic warning sign? Does it not portend very dark things to come, the direct result of our strained relationship with Earth, an obvious indicator that we have overstayed our welcome and are living too close to the edge? Except wait, no, not really, because while there are far worse signs than Japan (tar sands, BP oil spill, colony collapse, Keisha), there are also many that are far better, and really we're not doing so bad after all, when you think about it.
Good news: We're living longer than ever. Cancer rates, murder rates, smoking rates, teen pregnancy rates are down. In nine very happy countries, organized religion is becoming extinct. Overall quality of life is improving planetwide. China and India and many developing nations are all experiencing unprecedented growth and prosperity due to advanced technology and the global supereconomy, relatively speaking.
Bad news: All this means is we're living further and further beyond the planet's means, stretching her resources to the breaking point just so seven billion of us can have a bit of clean water, aspirin and free WiFi in the skinnin' hut.
Hear that ticking sound? It's a massive time bomb of incomprehensible socioecological devastation, just beginning to explode. Or maybe it's God's rose gold Panerei, ticking warmly as She counts down the minutes to the great awakening, the grand shift, and we all transmute to light energy and fuzzy sighs. Neat!
Which do you prefer? Are things getting uglier by the minute, moving closer and closer to imminent doom? Or are things really on the upswing, generally improving and getting brighter despite the onslaught of negativity and Fox News moronism?
Does the Fukushima disaster mean nuclear power is wildly dangerous and must be stopped, or does it mean we should build more reactors, because hell, not even a 9.0 quake and tsunami mere inches from the site could cause much more than an extremely localized, relatively contained incident? Baby, we got this nuclear power thing down. Or we don't.
It is 2011 and here is what we know: Reality is fluid, fact is malleable, cause and effect completely uncertain. We know what we don't know, but we also know the opposite. We are told multiple stories, versions, ideas, adaptations of truth that cannot be verified or confirmed, because our global media has lost nearly all credibility, largely because of, well, you, because everyone wants it all for free, the value of an engaged, highly informed populace has plummeted, and also because media conglomerates have shamelessly whored out their once-respectable newsrooms as a profit centers.
Result: Fox News. Result: Andrew Breitbart. Result: A shamelessly malevolent GOP that openly loathes its own constituents and fellates the rich like never before. Result: The truth simply doesn't have much of a chance. Wait, does it? Maybe it does. After all, positives abound.
There has never been a better time to be an optimist. There has never been a better time to be a fatalist. There has never been a deeper collective urge to tune out all the careening white noise and dash off to the woods with a packet of poppy seeds and a copy of "Sailing to Byzantium" and start your own cult.
Except that the woods are full of pesticides, meth labs and redneck Tea Party inbreds who think Obama is a Muslim Nazi socialist, guns are for licking, and you, yes you, are a despicable godless commie pervert for caring enough to read this column right now.
Except no, it's actually not, and they probably don't. They're probably all very nice, honest people, full of love and heart and hope, just trying to get by. You know, just like you. Really, who can say for sure?
Is Sitting a Lethal Activity? By JAMES VLAHOS Published: April 14, 2011
DR. LEVINE’S MAGIC UNDERWEAR resembled bicycle shorts, black and skintight, but with sensors mounted on the thighs and wires running to a fanny pack. The look was part Euro tourist, part cyborg. Twice a second, 24 hours a day, the magic underwear’s accelerometers and inclinometers would assess every movement I made, however small, and whether I was lying, walking, standing or sitting.
James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has an intense interest in how much people move — and how much they don’t. He is a leader of an emerging field that some call inactivity studies, which has challenged long-held beliefs about human health and obesity. To help me understand some of the key findings, he suggested that I become a mock research trial participant. First my body fat was measured inside a white, futuristic capsule called a Bod Pod. Next, one of Dr. Levine’s colleagues, Shelly McCrady-Spitzer, placed a hooded mask over my head to measure the content of my exhalations and gauge my body’s calorie-burning rate. After that, I donned the magic underwear, then went down the hall to the laboratory’s research kitchen for a breakfast whose calories were measured precisely.
A weakness of traditional activity and obesity research is that it relies on self-reporting — people’s flawed recollections of how much they ate or exercised. But the participants in a series of studies that Dr. Levine did beginning in 2005 were assessed and wired up the way I was; they consumed all of their food in the lab for two months and were told not to exercise. With nary a snack nor workout left to chance, Dr. Levine was able to plumb the mysteries of a closed metabolic universe in which every calorie, consumed as food or expended for energy, could be accounted for.
His initial question — which he first posed in a 1999 study — was simple: Why do some people who consume the same amount of food as others gain more weight? After assessing how much food each of his subjects needed to maintain their current weight, Dr. Levine then began to ply them with an extra 1,000 calories per day. Sure enough, some of his subjects packed on the pounds, while others gained little to no weight.
“We measured everything, thinking we were going to find some magic metabolic factor that would explain why some people didn’t gain weight,” explains Dr. Michael Jensen, a Mayo Clinic researcher who collaborated with Dr. Levine on the studies. But that wasn’t the case. Then six years later, with the help of the motion-tracking underwear, they discovered the answer. “The people who didn’t gain weight were unconsciously moving around more,” Dr. Jensen says. They hadn’t started exercising more — that was prohibited by the study. Their bodies simply responded naturally by making more little movements than they had before the overfeeding began, like taking the stairs, trotting down the hall to the office water cooler, bustling about with chores at home or simply fidgeting. On average, the subjects who gained weight sat two hours more per day than those who hadn’t.
People don’t need the experts to tell them that sitting around too much could give them a sore back or a spare tire. The conventional wisdom, though, is that if you watch your diet and get aerobic exercise at least a few times a week, you’ll effectively offset your sedentary time. A growing body of inactivity research, however, suggests that this advice makes scarcely more sense than the notion that you could counter a pack-a-day smoking habit by jogging. “Exercise is not a perfect antidote for sitting,” says Marc Hamilton, an inactivity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center.
The posture of sitting itself probably isn’t worse than any other type of daytime physical inactivity, like lying on the couch watching “Wheel of Fortune.” But for most of us, when we’re awake and not moving, we’re sitting. This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.
Hamilton’s most recent work has examined how rapidly inactivity can cause harm. In studies of rats who were forced to be inactive, for example, he discovered that the leg muscles responsible for standing almost immediately lost more than 75 percent of their ability to remove harmful lipo-proteins from the blood. To show that the ill effects of sitting could have a rapid onset in humans too, Hamilton recruited 14 young, fit and thin volunteers and recorded a 40 percent reduction in insulin’s ability to uptake glucose in the subjects — after 24 hours of being sedentary.
Over a lifetime, the unhealthful effects of sitting add up. Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between 1992 and 2006. The men in the study who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The death rate for women who sat for more than six hours a day was about 40 percent higher. Patel estimates that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off of their lives.
Another study, published last year in the journal Circulation, looked at nearly 9,000 Australians and found that for each additional hour of television a person sat and watched per day, the risk of dying rose by 11 percent. The study author David Dunstan wanted to analyze whether the people who sat watching television had other unhealthful habits that caused them to die sooner. But after crunching the numbers, he reported that “age, sex, education, smoking, hypertension, waist circumference, body-mass index, glucose tolerance status and leisure-time exercise did not significantly modify the associations between television viewing and all-cause . . . mortality.”
Sitting, it would seem, is an independent pathology. Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. “Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.”
The good news is that inactivity’s peril can be countered. Working late one night at 3 a.m., Dr. Levine coined a name for the concept of reaping major benefits through thousands of minor movements each day: NEAT, which stands for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis.In the world of NEAT, even the littlest stuff matters. McCrady-Spitzer showed me a chart that tracked my calorie-burning rate with zigzagging lines, like those of a seismograph. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to one of the spikes, which indicated that the rate had shot up. “That’s when you bent over to tie your shoes,” she said. “It took your body more energy than just sitting still.”
In a motion-tracking study, Dr. Levine found that obese subjects averaged only 1,500 daily movements and nearly 600 minutes sitting. In my trial with the magic underwear, I came out looking somewhat better — 2,234 individual movements and 367 minutes sitting. But I was still nowhere near the farm workers Dr. Levine has studied in Jamaica, who average 5,000 daily movements and only 300 minutes sitting.
Dr. Levine knows that we can’t all be farmers, so instead he is exploring ways for people to redesign their environments so that they encourage more movement. We visited a chairless first-grade classroom where the students spent part of each day crawling along mats labeled with vocabulary words and jumping between platforms while reciting math problems. We stopped by a human-resources staffing agency where many of the employees worked on the move at treadmill desks — a creation of Dr. Levine’s, later sold by a company called Steelcase.
Dr. Levine was in a philosophical mood as we left the temp agency. For all of the hard science against sitting, he admits that his campaign against what he calls “the chair-based lifestyle” is not limited to simply a quest for better physical health. His is a war against inertia itself, which he believes sickens more than just our body. “Go into cubeland in a tightly controlled corporate environment and you immediately sense that there is a malaise about being tied behind a computer screen seated all day,” he said. “The soul of the nation is sapped, and now it’s time for the soul of the nation to rise.”
James Vlahos (jamesvlahos@gmail.com) writes often for Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. Editor: Ilena Silverman (i.silverman-MagGroup@nytimes.com).
central heating? .. granted in very hot and cold regions, sure, in many circumstances justified .. but as much as they are used? .. one day walking in Vancouver we noticed 99% of Vancouverites were as rugged up as an Eskimo might be in her spot in the world, yet with a light sweater it was comfortable .. yup, it did create wonder at why? .. then on arriving back at the house moving from the comfortably cool and invigorating outside to the stuffy, energy dragging, centrally heated inside was a drag and always felt unhealthy to us .. we felt it just couldn't be good for us .. glad to read again it actually isn't, as abused.
cleanliness? .. as the excess 'cleanliness' trick with parents raising children who never experience the fun of tree-climbing (too dangerous Barbara, even for Tommy it's too risky) and of playing in good healthy dirt .. those children who then cringe and oh no when an apple is picked off the floor, dusted on a sleeve and chomped on .. parents? .. kids? .. seriously .. how can a defense system develop if it isn't given opportunity to defend .. give your immune system a chance.
On that note, give Obama a chance, too.
Much research 'reveals' what common sense should have seen before.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
