Why I don’t like the Caveman Diet

A few years ago I was introduced to the ‘Caveman Diet’.

The theory goes like this. Civilisation is an eye-blink in our history, and we’re not adapted to the things we eat today, which make us ill in consequence. We should be eating the same food that Ugh Ugh the Cave Man scoffed in 35,000 BC – raw nuts, grains, fruit, vegetables.

To which I said then – and still say now – rubbish!

Not only are humans geared to eat cooked food, we look like we do because of it. If we had to munch raw nuts, fruit and grains all day (and it would take all day to get the calories), we’d have jaws like an orang-utan. (I had breakfast with one once, but that’s another story…)

The science is clear. An ability to control fire – which may have begun 700,000 years ago – allowed early hominins to cook. Cooking reduces the energy needed to digest food, increasing the yield. One side effect was the drop in tooth and jaw size. It was also reflected in biochemistry.

As for the ‘cave man’ diet – well, there wasn’t one. A  lot depended on where people were. Even today, African hunter-gatherers have a wider range of foods available than people living on the edge of the ice sheets.

Neandertal family group approximately 60,000 years ago. Artwork by Randii Oliver, public domain, courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The diet near the ice sheets was typified by that much maligned character, Cucu! the Neandertal. About ninety percent of the Neandertal diet was meat, and big game meat at that. Get this – Cucu! the Neandertal would head out armed with a heavy thrusting spears, and go into combat with mammoths and rhinocerii. Seriously. Skeletons have been found with upper body injuries identical, in form, to the ones rodeo riders get while steer wrasslin’. (What’s Neandertal for ‘yeeee-haaw!’?)

I’ve ridden elephants. There is no way I would want to go into combat with one, armed only with a spear. As for rhinos…well, uh…

The other issue is that there’s no return path to Ice Age foods for us.  We’ve selectively bred everything we eat today, and studies have shown that our biochemistry has adapted to suit. Today’s main wheat strain didn’t even exist 100 years ago (the guy who bred the super-wheat we use now only died recently).

The ‘cave man diet’, in short, is fantasy. Paleo-nostalgia.

So why does it work for some people? Part of the reason is that modern foods contain additives. Commercial chicken, for instance, is full of antibiotics, so if you’re intolerant to penicillins, it won’t do favours. All sorts of issues follow from immune system dysfunction – so, on the cave man diet, some people feel healthier.

So does this mean we’ll eventually adapt to being able to lie on couches with our Game Boys and TV remotes, surrounded by the detritus of chips, pizza and cola drinks?

Well, maybe, but something tells me not.

What are your thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Rain, rain nowhere, and not a drop to drink anyway…

New Zealand’s problem just now is it’s not very green. It’s brown. And yellow.

After four summers washed out by relentless rain, 2013 has opened with a one-in-seventy-year drought. Wellington region is especially hit – the municipal water supply is at crisis level. Any external use, even a watering can, is strictly forbidden – and they’re pinging people who transgress. We had a present locally last week in the form of two-and-a-bit days rain. But not enough – it sufficed only to wash rubbish into the system – throwing Wellington, where I live, on to its 10-day emergency supply.

The other Saturday I went to have a look at the Hutt River – Te Awakairangi, also called the Heretaunga river. Or, to anybody who’s seen The Fellowship of the Ring, Anduin.

The Hutt river. An American frontier-style fort was built on the bank on the left of this picture in the late 1840s. There’s no trace now, of course. What this picture doesn’t convey is the stagnant smell.

The Hutt river, looking south towards the rail bridge. Usually there’s a lot more water in it than this. Its pakeha name comes from Sir William Hutt (1801-1882), one of the shareholders of the New Zealand Company.

It’s the main source for most of Wellington region’s water. And it’s virtually dry.

Worse, New Zealand also generates a big chunk of our power with water, down south. That’s not in good order either. I’ve got a post coming up on our nifty eco-friendly hydro-power engineering. But that won’t fill the storage lakes.

Time, I think, to plan Laundry Day. That usually spurs rain. At least if I’m involved.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this week: more writing posts – ‘sixty second writing tips’ and ‘write it now’. More geekery. And, aside from blogging, rain… I hope.

Russian meteor could be Pope resignation conspiracy, but I prefer science

It was one of those awful coincidences. Last Friday evening I was having a few beers with a friend, in a local pub. He was calculating the likely impact energy if 2012 DA14 – due to make a close pass over Indonesia – were to ever hit us.

Earth. An image I made with my Celestia installation (cool, free, science package).

There are websites with Java script that do this, but it’s easy yourself if you have figures for velocity and mass –  a function of volume and density – plus the formula and a calculator. (Yes, I know it had been published, but it’s fun to do the math. I’m a geek and so are my friends. Remember…geeks won….)

Nobody realised another object was about to explode over Chelyabinsk – ‘Tankograd’ of Second World War fame.

The 1200 injured from flying glass is the largest human toll recorded from a meteor strike. The cost to Russia will be in the millions of roubles. Not to mention the fact that thousands of people are facing sub-zero temperatures in windowless homes, until they can be fixed.

All that because the Pope resigned. Well, it’s obvious. The Conspirating Ruling Archaic Poodles, a secret cabal nobody has ever heard of, used their stooges to drop one of their orbiting Bombs Utilising Low Level Seekrit Hyper Invisible Termination on the Vatican, thus covering up the Pope’s resignation, but because secret organisations always make basic arithmetical errors, it hit Russia instead. I have proof this is true, because they fly in invisible black helicopters. Well, have you seen one? Quite. Proves they exist…

And yes, I know that is a really, really stupid theory…but hey, it’s not the dumbest one out there.

Needless to say, the science involved actually answers all questions. First off – the energy involved is mind-blowing on the scale of us mere humans.

How mind blowing? Try this. The Russian rock was maybe 10,000 tonnes mass and 17 metres diameter, by NASA estimate. Yet still exploded with an energy equivalent, some estimates suggest, of around 500,000 tons of TNT. How come?

Well, it’s entirely to do with kinetic energy, which you calculate according to the formula 1/2 MV<exp>2.  It was moving at over 63,000 km/h when it hit the atmosphere. That gave it a kinetic energy (roughly) of around 500,000,000,000,000 joules. Translated into human terms, that’s what a 1-kilowatt fan heater would emit if run constantly for 15,844 years (it would run out in about March in that last year).

That’s a lot of energy. So why did it explode? At the speed this sucker hit us, it was moving so fast it couldn’t push the atmosphere out of the way. The air was compressed ahead of it, got super-hot, and then began vapourising the front side of the meteor. But the back side was still ice-cold. After a while, differential thermal stresses exceeded the tensile strength of the object – and boom! A lot of the kinetic energy translated into a massive shock wave, shattering glass over that huge area, and powerful enough to be detected in Alaska. Some became heat. Some was retained in the fragments of meteor that hurtled into the ground, which will be found sooner or later (they’re looking now).

The take-home lesson from Friday? The odds of a damaging meteor hitting us, by human time-spans, are low . But these things do happen. And we didn’t see this one coming despite a determined effort of late to detect everything in our vicinity that might be a threat. We’ve even found the S-1VB stage from Apollo 12, which is lobbing around in a weird orbit nearby. But Friday’s rock – still a city-buster – was too small.

A Hubble picture of Jupiter after it had been machine-gunned by Comet Shoemaker-Levy in 1994. NASA, public domain, via Wikipedia.

Worse, even if we had seen it, there was nothing we could have done.  The laws of physics are clear; Bruce Willis and a gang of Texan oil-riggers aren’t going to save the day at the last moment. I’ve explained why in an earlier post – check it out. Even if you could carry enough rocket fuel to get to an incoming rock and blow it up (which you can’t….trust me…) most of the bits will still hit the Earth with the same net kinetic energy. And it’s that energy that’s the problem.

That doesn’t mean we can’t find ways of handling it. Given decades of warning,  even spray-painting the side of a space rock black will work, by changing the way it re-radiates solar energy, asymmetrically. Over years, that will change the orbit.

Of course, space debris usually isn’t isolated. A comet can break up, leaving trails of objects following its original orbit. Jupiter was slammed by just such a train ‘o doom  in 1994. There’s a fair chance that we might have to try and deflect half a dozen potential impactors all at once.

Personally I’m not going to lose sleep over it. No point worrying about things we can’t control. And the prospect of being slammed by a space rock is pretty far down the list. Here in New Zealand, for instance, it’s more likely we’ll be hit by an earthquake – in fact, there was a small one in my city on Saturday and another tremor this morning.

What’s your take? Should we worry about that which we cannot control? Or get on with life?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

‘Kindness 2013’ returns next week. Coming up this week: more sixty-second writing tips, Write It Now part 6 – and more.

Inspirations: eco-recovery in extreme dirt road trucker land

Ever watch Ice Road Truckers? One of my favourite shows de jour. A few weeks ago I spent half a day in New Zealand’s own extreme truck-driving environment, the open-cast coal mine at Stockton. It’s New Zealand’s biggest mine, perched on a dizzying plateau north of Westport, right above a town with the apt name of Granity.

The view from the Stockton plateau, looking southwest towards Westport. I have to say it… is this an awesome view, or what?

The view from the plateau is stunning. As is the work in the mine – which is where the extreme trucking comes in. It’s to do with the scale. Everything looks normal, until you stand next to it.

This digger is way bigger than it seems. Look at the size of the driver.

Some serious earth-moving. The tech term for the soil covering the coal is ‘overburden’.

Here’s a picture of me in front of one of the trucks. I am 182 cm tall without the hat. I think I’ve lived in houses smaller than that truck. These can carry 70 tonnes of spoil downhill in one hit. And there are bigger ones on the mine that lug 100 tonnes uphill (not down – it’s a brake temperature problem). The big rigs operated by the trucking company I once worked for, an aeon or so ago, topped out at less than half the loaded weight of these suckers.

This Tasmanian-built Haulmax with Caterpillar diesel is one big sucker.

Kind of cool – certainly for blokes. Did I mention they start by using explosives to break up the rock? Then cut loose with that ultra-heavy moving machinery? My wife watched the earth-moving action and made some comment about boys in sandpits, but hey… A little later, we learned that women drive the trucks too, and have a better maintenance record than the men.

Down sides? Well, the coal’s exported, mostly to India, where it’s used for steel-making, but also burned. And as you can imagine, open cast mining leaves its mark on the landscape – piles of spoil, great ledged pits where coal has been scooped out, all surrounded with the detritus of heavy industry. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. I took a photograph.

Part of the coal mine. Kind of ugly.

Plus side? That landscape is temporary. New Zealand has strict resource laws, and this place operates under conditions. One is that there must be no visible sign of the mine from below. Another is that they put back the original top-cover, plant cover and animals – returning the plateau to a natural state as good as, or better than, it was before.

Restoration – back to what it was once like. A pretty bleak plateau in natural state, but with its own rugged asethetic.

That’s been ongoing. Before excavation begins, the original top layer with its plant and insect life is re-positioned nearby for preservation and re-installation later. It’s important. The plateau is home to specialised life – unique plants adapted to the bleak environment, even rare native snails. Some snails, I am told, are collected and preserved for the future in refrigerators. Not only does the chill not hurt them, they’ve apparently even been breeding there. Slowly – uh, obviously.

I think it’s pretty inspiring.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Inspirations: from the ruins, hope rising

I am standing in the centre of Christchurch, New Zealand. It is my first visit since a series of devastating quakes shook the city to pieces. The most violent, in February 2011, killed 185 people, two-thirds of them in the collapse of a single building. And I am stunned at the destruction, even two years on.

The Christ Church Cathedral – icon of a city for nearly 150 years and the raison d;’etre for its founding in 1850. Now a ruin, due to be demolished.

I took this holding the camera above my head to avoid a fence, pointing and guessing…This is the third attempt.

Demolition under way.

The Christchurch I knew is gone. The centre city is a wasteland of shingled and empty lots, ruined buildings and demolition trucks. Surviving tower blocks lean with tired abandon, like rows of crooked teeth. Most are due to come down.

Tumbling rocks devastated houses beneath – and above.

Beyond, houses lie empty. Just two years ago they were proud symbols of domestic prosperity. Today they are abandoned, their walls cracked, shingled roofs askew, grass growing tall through cracks in the driveway. Grey silt, the dried remnants of liquefaction, lies unexpectedly here and there. Cars bibble over rippled tarmac; bridges that were once smooth are arched.In the seaside suburbs, houses teeter on the edges of new cliffs, rubble still piled below. Walls of shipping containers shield roads and houses from fresh falls.It is a city devastated.

And yet it is also a city with hope. Everywhere, Council trucks and diggers are working to renew sewerage, water, gas and electricity lines. Some buildings are swathed in scaffolding. The Arts Centre – the former Canterbury University buildings, where Ernest Rutherford worked - is being repaired. Near the old Cashel Mall – where masonry tumbled into the streets, crushing people – there is a mall of shipping containers. It is abuzz with sound; singers perform on a stage, people sit drinking coffee and enjoying the sun.

Sunlight and shadow made life very difficult for the camera, the modern CCD is not as good with tonal variations as film, and the exposure was on the concrete. I had to adjust the shadow balances post-production.  This is a detail of the original image.

That’s more like it. This is straight out of the camera, unedited apart from  the copyright notice and re-sizing to fit the blog. Christchurch’s shipping container mall – 2013.

There is a spirit here which speaks of hope, of life, of a brighter future. It is inspiring.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Running the zombie Christmas mall gauntlet

it’s Christmas again…and that means a visit to (dramatic chord)… The Mall.

The Zombie Christmas Maul

It’s the same every year. The endless shuffle of zombiefied shoppers, drifting around shiny glass-and-glitz caverns, a mass of humanity with glazed eyes and shopping bags, punctuated by toddlers who lurch aimlessly out from the crowd, shrieking and hyperventilating. There are teenage boys who smell like they’ve just showered with a cocktail of propionic acid and brevibacteria, girls who giggle and text somebody three feet away, just because they can, all endlessly circling like – well, endlessly circling things who like circling endlessly.

And then, in the midst of this glittering temple to the worst excesses of shallow consumerism and the transient disposability of post-industrial A-gen society…Father Christmas. He’s moved here from the North Pole apparently.

There’s something about these places that turns the brain to mush and reduces people to zombiefied numbness. I am not allowed to punk them – you know, do the zombie walk behind these  shoppers and murmur ‘braaaaaiins’. Well, I can, but She Who Must Be Obeyed has to walk on the other side of the mall atrium for a while afterwards.

But honestly!

It’s done deliberately. People buy more if their mind’s switched off. And I have to feel sorry for the poor folks that have to work in these places. Malls are the twenty-first century equivalent of the workhouse when it comes to conditions.

Every mall I’ve been to from North Sydney to Lower Hutt to Bangkok has been exactly the same. The Australia and New Zealand ones even look the same. Is this the unity in diversity beloved of anthropologists?

I’ve got readers of this blog from Melbourne to Florida, from the Netherlands to Cape Town, from Houston to New York to France to Moscow to Dunedin. Am I right that it’s the same everywhere? The look. The raw horror of it all. The commercialism? The mindless advertising. The glitz. The ….the…

“Braaaainnns….”

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012 

Get your Mayan apocalypse insurance here!

In a week, we’re told, the Mayan Long Count calendar is going to roll over to Day 1,872,000, and at that point the world will end.

Earth. An image I made with my Celestia installation (cool, free, science package).

That’s 21 December, presumably Eastern Standard Time.  Apparently some people are buying survival shelters. Others are hoping to stand on mountain tops such as the Pic de Bugarach waiting to be uplifted by UFO’s. Exactly where these have come from is undefined. Remulak, possibly.

The instrument of the apocalypse, apparently, is a gigantic planet named Nburu which has been hiding behind the Sun and is going to dash out and smash us on the 21st. Apparently NASA knows about but has been conspiring to hide the knowledge from us. Or maybe the Apocapyptinator will be a giant solar flare. Or something. There has been panic buying of salt in Novokuznetsk. In Omutininsk they are buying kerosene.

Me? I’ve paid all this the attention it actually deserves. This much attention, in fact:

I have two reasons. One is that there is no basis whatsoever for the fear, even if the Mayans themselves thought an apocalypse was coming, which they don’t. The Niburu idea has been around a while – it was meant to hit us in 2003 but didn’t, and afterwards the ‘apocalypse’ got pushed out to 2012. Of course. This week even the official Vatican astronomer, Father Jose Gabriel Funes, weighed in to debunk the whole idea from the science perspective. The other reason is that I’m not even going to dignify “2012 doom” by trying to engage the particular arguments. (The real science tells me an asteroid shot past Earth on Wednesday – and we didn’t die. I’ll post about that soon).

The more important thing for me is what this tells us about human nature. The notion of a sudden apocalypse seems to be part of the human psyche. Virtually every society has these fears, or have constructed some cycle-with-armageddon/ragnarok into its mythology. Our most epic tales revolve around it.

Today, in the west, we also seem to have an unending capacity to intellectualise our way into believing the apocalypse on the basis of what is meant to be ‘science’, though there is precious little science about most of the arguments.

Does anybody remember 1987? The year Nostradamus, apparently, said the world would end.

Except it didn’t. Or on 6 June 2006 (6/6/06). Or in 1666, actually. Of course there’s always next time…isn’t there…

Still, who am I to complain? So here’s the deal. Announcing the New Age Ultra-Defender Security From The Mayan Apocalypse package. All you have to do is give me all your assets, cash, a legally binding promise of all future earnings, and the stupid nick-nack that some relative gave you three Christmases ago. In return, I offer an appropriate payout if the apocalypse occurs, at my discretion. Large print: the ‘apocalypse’ is defined as the total destruction to dust and random gases of Earth and the total death of everybody on it, including me, at some point between 12.00 am and 11.59 pm, 21 December 2012 NZT, by a large foot descending on to the planet with a large raspberry noise.

Any takers?

Next time: things that actually could destroy us (but probably won’t).

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

The perils of life around the real Mount Doom

New Zealand’s Mount Tongariro erupted today for the second time in four months.

A photo I took a few years ago. Lake Taupo, with Mount Tauhara (another volcano) in the background. Taupo isn’t a placid lake filled with trout. Well, it is. But it’s also the caldera of one of the world’s biggest supervolcanoes. Uh – yay.

The blast happened without warning. Geological and Nuclear Sciences staff had been worried about possible eruption from the next-door volcano, Ruapehu. But nothing from Tongariro.

It’s apposite. The Hobbit is revving up for its premiere next week – and back in 2000, Peter Jackson used Mount Ngaruhoe, technically one of Tongariro’s vents, as Mount Doom.

How it will develop – if it does at all – remains to be seen. The eruption earlier this year lasted for days, dropped ash across my home town of Napier, and sent a cloud of hydrogen sulphide drifting across the North Island. That reached Wellington, where I live now.

Still, it could be worse. It could be nearby Taupo, one of the world’s 50-odd “supervolcanoes”.  Taupo last erupted in 186 AD and gave the Romans spectacular sunsets (think about it!). But that blast was a tiddler compared to the real ‘blow’, 27,000 years ago. That mega-eruption sent over 1150 cubic kilometres of debris rocketing skywards, annihilating everything in the central plateau and blowing a great gouge out of the crust.

That’s our real Mount Doom. Kind of funny to realise that today it’s a lake, and a pretty placid one, too.

I wonder what it will be tomorrow?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Writing inspirations: Zane Grey’s secret Kiwi hide-away

It is more than eighty years since Zane Grey made Otehei Bay in Urupukukapuka Island his hide-away. It’s one of the islands in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands. Here, over several seasons between 1927 and 1933, the US author spent weeks big-game fishing and writing cowboy stories.

Oetehei Bay, Bay of Islands – a photo I took in high summer, more than eighty years after Zane Grey first used this bay as a fishing and writing retreat.

It was very difficult for me to get this ‘hole in the rock’ picture – the boat was rolling and I kept being jostled.

Today the Bay of Islands is one of New Zealand’s top attractions – visited by tens of thousands of tourists a year who come there for the fishing, for the warmth, and for spectacles such as the ‘hole in the rock’, out on the edge of the bay.

Grey’s island hide-away is a nexus for water traffic. There is a a café just up from the shore, where She Who Must Be Obeyed and I ate a mildly over-priced lunch. A concert venue next door was being set up with various burps and beeps.

Later we walked down the beach under a bright sky, away from the people and the noises and the boats. Our feet crunched on shell sand. I tried to imagine the place without the tourists, without the intrusion of the new – pristine, isolated, as it would have been in the 1920s.

Later we found ourselves in the ‘Duke of Wellington’, one of New Zealand’s oldest hotels. It’s on the waterfront in the little town of Russell – known, when the hotel was set up – as Kororareka, the ‘hell hole of the Pacific’. Sailors, whalers – many of them from the US – convicts and beachcombers drank, and indulged in this town, a place where the lock-up was apparently a large crate – suitably ventilated – into which miscreants were flung.

A picture I took of the Russell foreshore. The Duke of Wellington – which Zane Grey frequented – is the low building on the middle left of the foreshore.

In the cool darkness of the main bar I sipped beer and looked at a wall given over to pictures of Grey with his fishing boat and the marlin dangling, like trophies, from the winches. And I knew that he hadn’t actually come out here for the writing.

But I could, I thought. I could sit on his island and write, if it wasn’t for the tourists.

Could you write in a place like that?

Go to my Pinterest board http://pinterest.com/mjwrightnz/new-zealand-landscapes/ for some more Kiwi landscapes.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Not the apocalypse…not yet…

Here in New Zealand we woke Tuesday morning to news that Mount Tongariro had erupted – briefly, but with enough vigour to send ash falling over my home town, Napier. I don’t live there these days, but I have family who do.

The Oruanui eruption, Taupo, 26,500 BP. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Taupo_2.png

It was the first eruption of Tongariro since 1897 and came by surprise. New Zealand has an excellent seismograph and volcano warning system – there are live webcams in the craters. Here’s White Island’s, complete with dinosaur. But this Tongariro eruption was left-field. It’s officially over as I write this – Geological and Nuclear Sciences have reduced the danger level - but White Island also erupted last week and Ruapehu is on heightened alert.

All these are tiddlers beside Lake Taupo, an active caldera in the same league as Toba and Yellowstone. The last big eruption, Hatepe, was around 180-230 AD and coated the central plateau with ash. It also gave the Romans and Chinese wonderful sunsets. The Oruanui eruption, around 26,500 years before the present, was the largest the world has seen in the last 70,000 years. It changed the structure of the lake, obliterated everything in the central North Island, and sent dust whipping through the upper air worldwide.

The immediate risk, though, is Auckland.  William Hobson chose the site in 1841 on the back of musket wars politics. Nobody knew, then, that it was atop a lava field. That’s why there are so many small extinct volcanoes – they’re driven from one source, and it erupts in a new place, usually, every time. Maori knew. Rangitoto – that island in the middle of the Waitemata – means ‘bleeding sky’. Hmmn…

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012