Re: the last post, the article mentions that some places use clams to test the toxicity of the water. It’s like that in Warsaw- we get our water from the river, and the main water pump has 8 clams that have triggers attached to their shells. If the water gets too toxic, they close, and the triggers shut off the city water supply automatically.
The clams are just better at measuring the water quality than any man-made sensors.
BMI was created in the 18th century by a European polymath–Adolphe Quetelet, who was obsessed with figuring out averages–and was never meant to be used as a medical tool (you can look it up)
This is an issue that mainly affect fat or “"overweight”“ people and I’m not trying to derail that but just to give people an idea how bad bmi is at representing reality. Back when i was an active athlete I once had a body fat percentage of 12 and a bmi that claimed I was obese at the same time
I keep hate-reading plague literature from the medieval era, but as depressed as it makes me there is always one historical tidbit that makes me feel a little bittersweet and I like to revisit it. That’s the story of the village of Eyam.
Eyam today is a teeny tiny town of less than a thousand people. It has barely grown since 1665 when its population was around 800.
Where the story starts with Eyam is that in August 1665 the village tailor and his assistant discovered that a bolt of cloth that they had bought from London was infested with rat fleas. A few days later on September 7th the tailor’s assistant
George Viccars
died from plague.
Back then people didn’t fully understand how disease spread, but they knew in a basic sense that it did spread and that the spread had something to do with the movement of people.
So two religios leaders in the town,
Thomas Stanley
and
William Mompesson,
got together and came up with a plan. They would put the entire village of Eyam under quarantine. And they did. For over a year nobody went in and nobody went out.
They put up signs on the edge of town as warning and left money in vinegar filled basins that people from out of town would leave food and supplies by.
Over the 14 months that Eyam was in quarantine 260 out of the 800 residents died of plague. The death toll was high, the cost was great.
However, they did successfully prevent the disease from spreading to the nearby town of Sheffield, even then a much bigger town, and likely saved the lives of thousands of people in the north of England through their sacrifice.
So I really like this story, because it’s a sad story, because it’s also a beautiful story. Instead of fleeing everyone in this one place agreed that they would stay, and they saved thousands of people. They stayed just to save others and I guess it’s one of those good stories about how people have always been people, for better or worse.
“The director of the first film, Andrew Adamson, was very focused on preserving real emotion, on seeing things for the first time, and having, like, a real sense of wonder.“
“So he didn’t actually show me the set of Narnia where the lamppost is until we shot it. I was blindfolded and guided into my place, and he told me to just walk around, that the camera would follow me.”
“And so I turned around and I saw it for the first time. It was in a studio but it was ri-dic-ul-ous-ly real. I couldn’t get my head around it. And so what you see is my real reaction to everything. It was incredible.”
On top of that, she had been close friends with the fella playing Tumnus and had not yet seen him in full costume. They were kept apart a few days before their meeting was shot so when she meets him and lights up? She’s seeing her friend for the first time in days and he’s also in costume.
See, this is where enforced method acting is okay and sweet and adorable.
