My Two Favourite Scienticians

Maggie Koerth-Baker is probably the best science writer I've ever encountered.  I have not yet read her new book, but it's pretty high on my reading list.

Quirks and Quarks is CBC's weekly science program.  It is one of my regular podcasts. Every week, host Bob McDonald does a fantastic job of finding neat new science and getting scientists to talk about their work in a way that is both accessible and interesting.  When you talk to as many scientists as I do, you realize what a feat that is. He gave great a seminar at U of T while I was there and showed us how much of that is simple editing by playing a solid minute of "um"s he'd edited out of the most recent show. But a lot of it is his ability to quickly grasp the key concepts and ask the right questions in the right order.

I'm a bit behind on my podcasts so I didn't know that Maggie KB was going to be on Quirks until Bob tweeted about it afterwards. Just the interview is available (below), or you can listen to the full episode – it's got whales!

As long as good choices are tough to remember to do, and as long as
good choices are tough in that they are actually detrimental to you,
we're not going to get the kind of wide-scale changes we actually need
to have happening.

Maggie Koerth-Baker on Quirks and Quarks

Cute but deadly

I learned a surprising fact today: there are now more tigers alive in captivity than in the wild. And a huge number of them live in the United States. And nobody knows exactly how many; a US government worker puts the number somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000. This is all stuff I learned on CBC's the Nature of Things.

The show was mainly about the debate amongst experts as to whether captive tigers are "junk" tigers, that is, too inbred to repopulate wild habitats.  It also did a pretty reasonable job of mitigating any "ZOMG WANT WANT WANT"-factor by highlighting the 2003 injury of stage magician and seasoned tiger trainer Roy Horn, and my personal favourite line about a tiger who had been seized from his owner and put in a sanctuary: "Had he been seized prior to that, his owner would still be alive today."

The thing that struck me as most interesting was the comment that we "need new ideas." This flies completely in the face of what is being discussed at that exact moment in the show: natural habitat destruction and illegal tiger goods. We don't need new ideas; we need political will. All the captive-bred tigers in the world aren't going to repopulate the wild if there's no wilderness to repopulate. And governments need to crack down on poaching by making sure the penalties for buying, trafficking, or selling tiger parts are harsh and consistently enforced.

Anyway, if you like cute animals or nature shows, totally worth watching.

The full episode is available online. 

Saving Face

You know those horrible ads for "#1 tip of a flat belly"? Those drive me nuts. If it's a flat belly, how can it have a tip? Or is it that the flat belly is giving you a tip? I wish someone would rewrite those ads.

Anyway, I also have a tip for you. I got it from Rob Carrick's Personal Finance Readers a couple of weeks ago. His semiweekly blog is always entertaining, if not always entirely useful.

A tip came up on Rob's Personal Finance Reader a few weeks ago which was: dry your razor completely after every use. Being the experimentally minded person I am, I gave it a try. For the last few weeks I have been using my breath and a small amount of toilet paper to remove all the water from my razor blade after use. And you know what? It works.

Previously, I would probably get 3 or 4 shaves out of a blade and on the 4th one my neck would look like a freshly plowed field. I'm now on shave 6 with this blade and not a nick at all today. So give it a try, it'll save you money and save your face.

Let me know if it works, or if you have any other easy money-saving (or environment-saving) tips you want me to try out and write about.