This is Improbable Too Page 25
Their insurance application form specifically excludes many of the activities that, one can infer, have proved troublesome.
They will not insure a clown for clowning that involves hypnosis, bouncy castles, hot air balloons, sky diving or competition racing. The application form does not distinguish between the numerous forms of racing – foot, horse, camel, bicycle, ski, cigarette boat, dragster, Spitfire, what-have-you.
Other things too, are verboten for the clown who wants to be protected by the association’s standard clown insurance.
No throwing objects in any manner other than juggling them.
No working with animals, other than ‘performing dogs, doves and rabbits’.
No ‘pyrotechnics, explosives, fireworks or similar materials’. But the association is not a killjoy. It explicitly makes an exception for ‘concussion effects’, ‘flashpots’ and ‘smokepots’.
No copyright infringement (that’s what they call it, though they may mean trademark infringement). The association specifically mentions Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse as examples. In any event, one would do well to seek professional advice before simultaneously wearing a Mickey Mouse costume and a clown suit.
The US is blessed with a large population of clowns. American clowns, unlike their counterparts in much of the world, are blessed with a wide variety of vendors eager to sell off-the-shelf clown insurance. American insurers, in agreement with their British brethren, view clowns as an increasingly specialized species of customer.
Not long ago, hypnotists, fire-eaters and people who do face-painting of children at public events were welcome to purchase standard clown-insurance policies. Then came legal climate change. Now everyone, no matter how clownish they believe themselves to be or not to be, should check the details before binding themselves to any policy that’s designed for clowns.
The life-saving qualities of pizza
A series of Italian research studies suggest that eating pizza just might do good things for a person’s health.
These benefits show up, statistically speaking and seasoned with caveats, among people who eat pizza as pizza. The delightful statistico-medico-pizza effects do not happen so much, the researchers emphasize, for individuals who eat the pizza ingredients individually.
Back in 2001, Dario Giugliano, Francesco Nappo and Ludovico Coppola, at Second University Naples, published a study in the journal Circulation called ‘Pizza and Vegetables Don’t Stick to the Endothelium’. The thrust of their finding was that, unlike many other typical Italian meals, pizza does not necessarily cause clogged blood vessels (atherosclerosis) and death.
Silvano Gallus of the Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche, in Milan, has cooked up several studies about the health effects of ingesting pizza.
In 2003, together with colleagues from Naples, Rome and elsewhere, Gallus published a report called ‘Does Pizza Protect Against Cancer?’, in the International Journal of Cancer. It compares several thousand people who were treated for cancer of the oral cavity, pharynx, oesophagus, larynx, colon or rectum with patients who were treated for other, non-cancer ailments. Several hospitals gathered data about what the patients said they habitually ate. The study ends up speaking, in a vague, general way of an ‘apparently favorable effect of pizza on cancer risk in Italy’.
In 2004, in a monograph in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention, Gallus and two colleagues wrote that ‘regular consumption of pizza, one of the most typical Italian foods, showed a reduced risk of digestive tract cancers.’ Later that year, another team anchored by Gallus published ‘Pizza and Risk of Acute Myocardial Infarction’. As you would expect from the title, its purpose was ‘to evaluate the potential role of pizza consumption on the risk of acute myocardial infarction’. Gallus and his team ‘suggest that pizza consumption is a favourable indicator’ for preventing, or at least not causing, heart attacks.
Gallus is in no way claiming that pizza prevents all ills. A Gallus-led study called ‘Pizza Consumption and the Risk of Breast, Ovarian and Prostate Cancer’ appeared two years later. These types of cancer are thought to arise differently from the kinds believed to be warded off by pizza. The study puts its message bluntly: ‘Our results do not show a relevant role of pizza on the risk of sex hormone-related cancers.’
The Gallus studies all hedge their bets a bit. Each says, one way or another (and here I’m paraphrasing them): ‘Pizza may in fact merely represent a general indicator of the so-called “Mediterranean” diet, which has been shown to have potential health benefits.’
All of this pertains to Italian-made pizza, metabolized in Italy by Italians. No matter how accurate the scientists’ interpretations turn out to be, there’s no guarantee that they hold true for foreign pizza, or for any pizza eaten anywhere by foreigners, or for unmetabolized pizza.
A monograph in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention explains that, whatever the good or bad of eating pizza may be, delivering the pies can put you on a collision course with unhappiness.
Dr Chris McLean and his colleague J. Bernard at Mayday University Hospital, in Croydon, UK, say they were inspired by a 1992 report, in the journal Injury, by Dr M.G. Dorrell of Edgware General Hospital in London. Dorrell ‘described a series of six patients who sustained bony injuries in road traffic accidents during the course of their employment as pizza delivery personnel’. Subsequently, the Pizza and Pasta Association, acting in concert with the government, developed a voluntary code of practice for home delivery individuals, with the goal of reducing or even eliminating pizza/transportation-induced bony and other injuries.
McLean and Bernard, a decade after the Edgeware pizza crack-up study, analysed what happened to three pizza delivery moped drivers who were themselves delivered to Mayday University Hospital. ‘None of them possessed a full UK driver’s license’, write McLean and Bernard, and ‘all three were involved in collisions with automobiles.’ One simply fell off his moped; the other two ‘somersaulted over their moped handlebars’. Piecing together the available evidence, McLean and Bernard tentatively conclude that ‘nonnative workers who lack English language skills and moped driving skills are at increased risk of moped accidents’.
Thus, pizza can most definitely not be ruled out as a nexus of havoc prior to ingestion.
Giugliano, Dario, Francesco Nappo, and Ludovico Coppola (2001). ‘Pizza and Vegetables Don’t Stick to the Endothelium’. Circulation 104 (7): E34–5.
Gallus, Silvano, Cristina Bosetti, Eva Negri, Renato Talamini, Maurizio Montella, Ettore Conti, Silvia Franceschi, and Carlo La Vecchia (2003). ‘Does Pizza Protect Against Cancer?’. International Journal of Cancer 107 (2): 283–4.
Gallus, Silvano, Cristina Bosetti, and Carlo La Vecchia (2004). ‘Mediterranean Diet and Cancer Risk’. European Journal of Cancer Prevention 13 (5): 447–52.
Gallus, Silvano, A. Tavani, and Carlo La Vecchia (2004). ‘Pizza and Risk of Acute Myocardial Infarction’. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 58 (11): 1543–6.
Gallus, Silvano, Renato Talamini, Cristina Bosetti, Eva Negri, Maurizio Montella, Silvia Franceschi, A. Giacosa, and Carlo La Vecchia (2006). ‘Pizza Consumption and the Risk of Breast, Ovarian and Prostate Cancer’. European Journal of Cancer Prevention 15 (1): 74–6.
McLean, C. R., and J. Bernard (2003). ‘Ethnicity as a Factor in Pizza Delivery Crashes’. Traffic Injury Prevention 4 (3): 276–7.
Dorrell, M. G. (1992). ‘The Cost of Home Delivery.’ Injury 23 (7): 495–6.
May we recommend
Cannibalism: Ecology and Evolution among Diverse Taxa
by M.A. Elgar and B.J. Crespi (Oxford University Press, 1992)
On page 361 the monograph gets right to the nub of the matter: ‘Cannibalism is a particularly antisocial form of behaviour.’
The smell of cadaverine in the morning
Putrescine and cadaverine, the two most frighteningly named of all chemicals, lurk in our mouths all day, every day. This simple fact emerged in 2003 when Professor Michael Cooke BSc PhD CChem FRSC
Eur Chem, of the Centre for Chemical Sciences, Royal Holloway, University of London, and two colleagues published a delectable horror story of a study called ‘Time Profile of Putrescine, Cadaverine, Indole and Skatole in Human Saliva’. It appeared in the Archives of Oral Biology. That journal – surprisingly, given its content – is a regular haunt of only a tiny fraction of the world’s horror fiction enthusiasts.
Professor Cooke and his companions imply that other chemists had grown discouraged at the prospect of doing a time profile of putrescine, cadaverine, indole and skatole in human saliva. The odour of saliva is intensely bland, compared to that of its most apallingly stenched components, and in a certain chemical sense, stable. An American group, they say, ‘reported their inability to increase the odour of saliva’. But Cooke and his team gave it a go and succeeded.
In isolation, putrescine and cadaverine are anything but bland. They smell even worse than their names suggest. The one was so named because it evokes, and is involved in, the putrefaction of flesh. The other’s name suggests, deliberately and accurately, the stench of rotting corpses. Biochemically, the pair are cousins, and though not inseparable, are often found in each other’s company. Together with their mundane-sounding (yet also pungent) companions indole and skatole, putrescine and cadaverine are formed by ‘bacterial putrefaction of saliva in the oral cavity’, explains the study.
Here’s how Cooke and his companions went about monitoring their presence.
Twelve dentally healthy volunteers, three women and nine men, supplied the spit. The scientists took pains to collect and handle it properly. They explain that ‘The unstimulated saliva was expectorated into a glass vial coated with 5 mg of NaF [sodium fluoride] to inhibit further [chemical reactions].’
The results appear in a simple graph. Its lines and data points tell an engrossing tale: the ‘mean concentration of cadaverine, putrescine and indole in saliva throughout the day’. (Skatole, though mentioned in the study’s title, never appears in measurable amounts.)
Cadaverine, putrescine and indole levels, having built up overnight, are high when we awaken. But ‘they are rapidly reduced by the combined action of eating breakfast and oral cleaning’. Then until the beginning of the work day (around 9:00 am) the levels remain steady.
The rest of the day has its ups and downs. Cadaverine, putrescine and indole levels rise until mid-morning, then slowly decline. Noontime brings dramatic change – the amounts are ‘reduced by the mechanical action of chewing involved in the ingestion of lunch’. After lunch, the levels rise pretty steadily until it’s time to knock off work.
Bacterial putrefaction in twelve subjects in ‘good general and oral health’ who had consumed ‘a controlled diet the evening before sample collection and during the saliva collection day’
The researchers stopped collecting data every day at 5:00 pm. What happens between then and dawn retains, slightly, an air of mystery.
Cooke, Michael, N. Leeves, and C. White (2003). ‘Time Profile of Putrescine, Cadaverine, Indole and Skatole in Human Saliva’. Archives of Oral Biology 48 (4): 323–7.
The giant who played with dead dolls
Frances Glessner Lee, the giant astride the world of miniature crime scenes, died nearly fifty years ago. Lee built a collection of what she called ‘nutshell studies’, each a tiny, high-precision recreation of a room in which a murder had been committed.
Each featured a little victim, in or on whom the wee murder weapon was embedded or enwrapped. The many lavishly grim elements of each diorama were, mostly, copped and composited from stories of real crimes.
Lee and her nutshell studies have a context. She endowed an entire, entirely new programme at Harvard Medical School: the department of legal medicine. The concocted crime scenes served as its mesmerizing centre of activity.
The authorities knew that Lee manufactured her evidence from whole cloth, sliced wallpaper, glass, wood, paint and other materials. They knew that she bankrolled the entire operation. They knew that she enlisted the aid of a carpenter, a pricey interior decorating firm and a company that makes doll’s houses. They knew that she conspired with a large number of police officers, whom she plied with lavish meals and strong drink. No one entirely figured out her motive.
Lee, the heiress of a wealthy Chicago farming-equipment manufacturing family, chose the department’s first (and only) leader – a dashing male doctor, her brother’s Harvard classmate, whom she had kept very much in mind during the decades that preceded her inheritance.
Several times a year, she would invite and fund police officers and medical examiners from across the US, thirty or forty at a time, to travel to her Harvard seminar in homicide investigation. Everyone would examine and discuss the miniature rooms, then go and dine together in splendour at one of Boston’s finest hotels. Lee even bought the hotel a costly set of china for use exclusively at these dinners.
Author-photographer Corinne May Botz crafted a book entitled The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Originally published in 2004, it shows appropriately disturbing close-up photos of the artificial crime scenes. Botz also reproduces the short descriptive texts that each visiting law-enforcement official was expected to read in connection with his (they were, apparently, all men) visit to Lee and her educational programme.
The US National Library of Medicine has put several of Botz’s photos online (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/visibleproofs/galleries/biographies/lee.html). A documentary film, Of Dolls and Murder, came out in 2012, with creepy John Waters narrating.
Lee-style fantastically detailed miniature crime-scene recreations never became a standard tool for crime-scene investigators. But their spirit lives on. There is now something of a police vogue for crime incident diagramming software, polyflex forensic mannequins and mini tubular dowel crime-scene reconstruction kits.
The Harvard department of legal medicine did not long survive the passing of its founder and funder. Its crown jewels, the little rooms, went south and now reside at the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Office in Baltimore.
Botz, Corinne May (2004). The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death: Essays and Photography. New York: Monacelli Press.
Eckert, W.G., (1981). ‘Miniature Crime Scenes: A Novel Use in Crime Seminars’. American Journal of Forensic Medicine & Pathology 2 (4): 365–8.
Lee, Frances Glessner (1952). ‘Legal Medicine at Harvard University’. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 42 (5): 674–8.
In brief
‘Spatial Patterning of Vulture Scavenged Human Remains’
by M. Katherine Spradley, Michelle D. Hamilton and Alberto Giordano (published in Forensic Science International, 2011)
The authors, at Texas State University-San Marcos, report: ‘After the initial appearance of the vultures, the body was reduced from a fully-fleshed individual to a skeleton within only 5 h.’
Fast robust automated brain extraction
Scientists marvel at how other scientists – the ones who study something other than what they themselves study – give strange meanings to common words.
Evan Shellshear, at Fraunhofer Chalmers Centre in Gothenburg, sent me an example, a study called ‘Fast Robust Automated Brain Extraction’.
Shellshear said: ‘I stumbled across this article somehow [whilst] looking for optimal code to quickly compute the distance between two triangles in three-dimension space for computer games. It sounds almost like something out of a game itself … After careful reading, [the paper] justifies the initially shocking title.’ The author is Stephen M. Smith who, back in 2002 when the paper came out, was at the department of clinical neurology at Oxford University’s John Radcliffe Hospital, and is now a professor of biomedical engineering.
Certain details might give you the willies, if you are unpractised in the ways and words of Dr Smith’s line of research. Especially in this age when zombies are so much in the public mind. One section of the paper carries the conceivably disturbing headline ‘Overview of the brain extraction metho
d’.
The abstract could plausibly have been written by Dr Phibes or any of a hundred other horror-movie body-part-snatching researchers. It says: ‘Brain Extraction Tool (BET) … is very fast … [I give] the results of extensive quantitative testing against “gold-standard” hand segmentations, and two other popular automated methods.’
That phrase ‘hand segmentations’ suggests lots of lengthy, laborious tedium. But in some contexts ‘hand segmentations’ could be a handy euphemism – in a discussion, say, of how to pluck out only the choicest parts of a cadaver’s brain after you’ve smashed open its skull.
Smith acknowledges that doing his deed by hand has one advantage over letting a computer do it: ‘Manual brain/non-brain segmentation methods are, as a result of the complex information understanding involved, probably more accurate than fully automated methods are ever likely to achieve.’
But he explains that, financially, it’s better when a computer does the dirty work. ‘There are serious enough problems with manual segmentation’, he warns. ‘The first problem is time cost. Manual brain/non-brain segmentation typically takes between 15 minutes and two hours.’
‘Fast Robust Automated Brain Extraction’ is not about sucking brains out of people’s skulls, alas.
Published in a journal called Human Brain Mapping, it’s about perceiving more clearly what’s in the pictures produced by modern imaging machines. These magnificent devices give such a profusion of detail that doctors sometimes can’t tell where one body part ends and another begins.