[b]Mary Roach
For every twenty-four hours awake, Belenky told me, people lose 25 percent of their capacity for useful mental work.[/b]
In that case, some here have been up for days.
To quantify the “benefit” side of the equation, a dollar amount is assigned to each saved human life. As calculated by the Urban Institute in 1991, you are worth $2.7 million.
In, for example, Monopoly money.
Squatting upon the floor of the room, without any perceptible effort he passed into the hollow of his hand the contents of the rectum . . . , wrote the anonymous writer’s physician in a letter printed in one of Fletcher’s books. The excreta were in the form of nearly round balls, and left no stain on the hand. There was no more odour to it than there is to a hot biscuit. So impressive, so clean, was the man’s residue that his physician was inspired to set it aside as a model to aspire to. Fletcher adds in a footnote that similar [dried] specimens have been kept for five years without change, hopefully at a safe distance from the biscuits.
Can you do this?
On the way here, I stopped in the office of a block captain who wanted to tell me about an inmate who was caught with two boxes of staples, a pencil sharpener, sharpener blades, and three jumbo binder rings in his rectum. He became known as “OD,” for Office Depot. They never found out what he intended to do with the stuff.
Like I always say, anything can be rationalized.
People blanch to see “fish meal” or “meat meal” on a pet-food ingredient panel, but meal–which variously includes organs, heads, skin, and bones–most closely resembles the diet of dogs and cats in the wild. Muscle meat is a grand source of protein, but comparatively little else.
Any blanchers here?
From time to time, there was talk among the astronauts that it might be nice to have a drink with dinner. Beer is a no-fly, because without gravity, carbonation bubbles don’t rise to the surface. You just get a foamy froth, says Bourland. He says Coke spent $450,000 developing a zero-gravity dispenser, only to be undone by biology. Since bubbles also don’t rise to the top of a stomach, the astronauts had trouble burping. Often a burp is accompanied by a liquid spray, Bourland adds.
You didn’t know this either, right?