What Caught My Eye Today - Venezuela, Air Pollution, Climate Change, Fat, Big Bang, Potpourri

Fred's Note:  With Earth Day coming up later this month (April 22), we have a few more "earthy" news items than normal.  Enjoy, and maybe just a little bit more appreciative of the planet.

Venezuela - As food shortages proliferate, Venezuelans are now being given identification cards, so they can buy groceries. Like a food stamp program, right? The government said the new cards, which can be used only at government-run supermarkets, are intended to track purchases to prevent people from buying up subsidized food then reselling it on the black market. Or perhaps not. Critics say the program marks the beginning of Cuban-style rationing. A combination of currency controls, which foil imports, and price controls, which discourage production, has resulted in shortages of such staples as milk, toilet paper and cooking oil. You have to tip your cap to the Venezuelan government.  It's pretty easy to mess up one's monetary policy (happens all the time in the United States), but these guys managed to foul up their entire financial system in every imaginable way. Bravo. 

Air Pollution - New findings from the World Health Organization show that air pollution was responsible for more than 7 million global deaths in 2012, making it the world's top environmental health risk. I guess gunfire falls into a different category. More than one third of those occurred in Asia, where rapid industrial development has contributed significantly to the problem. If you think about it, given that over half the world's population is in Asia, one-third doesn't seem so bad does it? Of course it does beg the question of where the other two-thirds are occurring. I'll put my money on Africa, as if it didn't have enough going against it. 4.3 million deaths were attributed to indoor pollutants, mainly from stoves that burn coal, wood, dung and crop residues. Toxic air outdoors figured in 3.7 million deaths. The hardest hit countries were low and middle income nations in Southeast Asia and the western Pacific. I would have thought that all those typhoons would have helped keep the air a bit cleaner. Clearly, I was wrong, and clearly these guys just cannot catch a break.

Not to pile on or anything, if the air doesn't get you, it appears that Mother Nature will.

Climate Change - A United Nations panel of leading environmental scientists issued a dire warning on the dangers of climate change, saying that global warming is already affecting every continent and threatens to devastate food supplies, cause mass extinctions of plants and animals, worsen droughts, and raise the risk of wars over resources. Just a second.  Isn't a war of resources already happening...you know, with oil? The panel said that rising oceans and droughts could displace hundreds of millions of people by the end of the century, causing trillions of dollars of damage. Surging temperatures have already lowered corn and wheat yields. The 2,500-page report comes at a critical time, as governments prepare to negotiate a new deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that is scheduled to be finalized by the end of 2015. 2,500 pages...are you kidding me?  Whose gonna read something that long, when the next Game of Thrones book could be published at any time?  To have any major impact, the agreement would need the cooperation of the United States and major energy users from the developing world, specifically China and India. Yeah, that's gonna happen.

Okay, enough bad news.  Here's a gem we can all stand up and cheer.

Fat - After 4 decades of persistent warnings that saturated fats should be avoided in healthy diets, new research has found no evidence linking the fats found in meat, butter and cheese to an increased risk of heart disease. Woo-hoo!  I'll have 6 double bacon cheeseburgers and a milkshake in every flavor that you have, thank you very much. The same study also found no firm evidence that unsaturated fats, such as omega-3 fatty acids, reduce heart disease rates. More good news. Maybe now we can stop over fishing the oceans. While saturated fats are known to increase "bad" cholesterol, the findings suggest that the relationship between cholesterol and heart disease is more complicated than previously thought. I'm sure it is complicated.  Here something that isn't so hard to wrap your head around...MODERATION!  Give it a try, people. Researchers did confirm that trans fats, such partially hydrogenated oils found in processed foods, do have a direct link to heart disease. Yeah, yeah, you can try to harsh my mellow all you want. Me and my deep-fried everything will be just fine and dandy.

Big Bang - Scientists have discovered gravitational "ripples" that provide strong evidence of the Big Bang. If confirmed, the findings will verify the theory of cosmic inflation, which hold that 13.8 billion years ago, the universe expanded violently from a hot, dense subatomic speck to the size of a golf ball in a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second and then kept expanding. Two questions. First, 13.8 billion years? Are you sure about that? Isn't it possible that this may have happened 13.7 billion years ago, or maybe even 13.9 billion? How can you be so sure, it was 13.8 billion. Was someone there?  Second question, how do you know it was a golf ball, and not a baseball, softball, or even a soccer ball (a football isn't round, so it couldn't possibly have been one of those)? When inflation was first proposed 35 years ago, scientists predicted the event would have been accompanied by waves of gravitational energy -- ripples in the fabric of space-time -- the afterglow of the Big Bang. The ripples also support the theory that the universe may be just one of a vast number that have burst into existence. Honestly, I do find this stuff fascinating (why else would I post so many stories on the subject?), but here's what I don't get.  How can you possibly prove or disprove such theories? It's taken almost 40 years for us to get a man-mad object to get to the edge of our solar system, to say nothing of our ignorance of the galaxy or universe. Now we're speculating that there are multiple universes. It's enough to make your head spin, you know, if the end of the world due to climate change doesn't do it for you.

Potpourri

• Basketball - None of the 15 million fans who submitted brackets for the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship will bet the 9.2-quintillion-to-one odds and win Warren Buffet's $1 billion prize for perfectly predicting the winning team for every game in this year's tournament. All entries got at least one game wrong in the first round of 32 games. Show of hands, who had Connecticut and Kentucky in the championship game?  Yeah, neither did I.
• Billionaires - California is home to 111 billionaires, the most of any state in the nation. Collectively, they hold assets worth $485 billion more than the entire GDP of all but 24 countries in the world. The state also suffers the highest poverty rate in the United States at 24%. Here's the thing, none of those guys picked the perfect bracket either. So if you think about it, they aren't any better than us, are they? 
• College Admissions - A new survey on college admissions statistics show that it is easier to get into an Ivy League college than to land a job at Google or Walmart. Ivy League universities accepted 8.9% of applicants last year, while a Walmart in Washington D.C. hired just 2.6% of 23,000 job seekers. Google, meanwhile hires just 0.5% of applicants. This is one those comparisons that I find amusing and irksome at the same time.  How can anyone draw a meaningful comparison between getting a job at Google and getting admitted to Harvard...besides a Harvard grad who gets that job at Google? On the other hand, I do draw some pleasure from the fact that all those Ivy League graduates will be duking it out to be a greeter at the local Walmart and most of them will be on the losing end of that deal.