What Snakes Are Teaching Us

As an alumnus of the University of Oregon (Ducks), I couldn’t help smirking upon learning that Oregon State University (Beavers) is home to 26,000 garter snakes. Not slithering, though. The snakes, accumulated over three decades, are brined in alcohol and stored in glass jars.

I’m not smirking any more. The specimens are useful in studying the effects of earth’s changing climate. Snakes are cold-blooded reptiles. They cannot regulate their internal body temperature and so are more quickly susceptible to their environment. As one OSU researcher put it, they “evolve rapidly in response to climate change.”

With specimens spanning decades and records of where the snakes were collected, scientists can measure how the reptiles have adapted to a warming climate. Snakes from drier areas have larger scales, but fewer of them, a response to the stress of dehydration. Larger scales retain moisture better than smaller scales. Scientists also track changes in immune system over the years.

This information is useful to humans, because, according to the scientists, “We actually share more in common with reptiles than we have that’s dissimilar.”

Meanwhile, in a refuge near the San Francisco International Airport, garter snakes are so far winning their battle for survival. The protected 180-acre site in this dense urban area, is home to 1,300 snakes and increasing numbers of deer, foxes and birds, along with thousands of invertebrates. SFO is improving its infrastructure to protect the airport from rising sea level. Wildlife in the adjacent refuge are also susceptible to encroaching salt water, which would be fatal to the California red-legged frog, a mainstay of the garter snake’s diet.

And unlike birds, the snakes do not pose a danger to aircraft taking off.

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Where Are the Thin Mints?

Did you miss your annual splurge of Thin Mints this year? Were you not accosted by cute little girls in Girl Scout uniforms as you entered your neighborhood grocery store? You’ve been working from home so no colleague of yours had a sign-up sheet to order cookies from a daughter’s Girl Scout troop?

The Covid-19 pandemic took its toll on the Girl Scouts. Membership in the venerable organization is down. In 2021, Girl Scouts of USA projected reduced sales. Even so, orders from the local councils were overly optimistic. The cookie season finished with 15 million unsold boxes.

For more than a century local Girl Scout troops have funded programs, travel, camps and other activities with their yearly cookie sale. The annual promotion typically sells 200 million boxes, bringing in $800 million.

For safety, there was very little person-to-person selling this year. Local scout councils tried taking orders on-line, drive-thru sales, even partnering with GrubHub.

As if the fear of Covid were not enough, in some areas cookie sales suffered from boycotts of products made with palm oil. News stories had linked palm oil with child labor.

Girl Scouts of USA is working with their two cookie bakers to sell or donate excess cookies to food banks, the military or prisons.

They are hopeful for a better season next year. ”Girl Scout cookie season isn’t just when you get to buy cookies,” said one leader. “It’s interacting with the girls. It’s Americana.”

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RIP Medical Debt

The number one driver of bankruptcies in the United States is the country’s dysfunctional health care system. Medical expenses cause 62% of bankruptcies in the U.S., a statistic unfathomable to residents of other first-world countries. Per capita medical cost in the U.S. was $11,172 in 2018. That’s 17.7% of Gross Domestic Product.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 26% of Americans aged eighteen through sixty-four have difficulty with medical bills, more than half of whom have medical insurance. (Medicare kicks in at age sixty-five.)

Hospitals and other medical providers typically sell their unpaid bills to collection agencies after ninety to a hundred-eighty days. Collection agencies pay pennies on the dollar for the right to collect the full amount of unpaid bills.
Enter RIP Medical Debt. Founded in 2014 by two veteran debt collectors, RIP buys debt portfolios from collection agencies and wipes out the indebtedness at no cost to the indebted. So far they have erased more than $4.5 billion of medical bills for more than 2.5 million individuals and families.

RIP Medical Debt recently purchased unpaid medical bills for the first time directly from a health care provider. Ballad Heath, a network of hospitals in Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina, sold $278 million of unpaid bills to RIP. Terms were not announced, but presumably the deal was more advantageous to RIP Medical Debt than with a collection agency in the middle. More than 80,000 low-income patients will have their outstanding bills, some as old as ten years, wiped out.

RIP Medical Debt is a 501(C)(3) non-profit organization and states that contributions to them are tax deductible. You can make a donation on their web site.

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101 Years and Done… or maybe not

Aficionados of Aplets and Cotlets received some bad news in March. Liberty Orchards, makers of the confection for more than a century, announced they would shut down operations in June. After a hundred-and-one years, there would be no more Aplets & Cotlets.

Mark Balaban and Armen Tertsagian, Armenian immigrants, owned a small orchard in Cashmere Washington. (Cashmere lies in central Washington, halfway between Wenatchee—home to the annual Apple Blossom Festival—and Leavenworth—a faux Bavarian village popular with tourists.)

The partners started the company in 1920 as way to sell surplus apples. They concocted Aplets, a candy combining apples and walnuts and gelatin. The confection was based on a candy they remembered called Turkish Delight. A few years later they introduced an apricot flavor, called Cotlets.

Continue reading “101 Years and Done… or maybe not”
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A Mother’s Day Story

Jesus brought a few of his disciples with him to a wedding celebration at Cana. It’s likely that relatives of Mary were getting married and so to please his mother he made the two-day walk from his evangelizing base in Judea.

After he arrived, his mother told him the hosts had run out of wine. Jesus responded that he had come to party, not to work. (“Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.”) Rather than rebuke her son for speaking so rudely to her or slapping him — or asking who invited the apostles — Mary simply told the servants, ”Do whatever he tells you.”

Jesus ordered the servants to fill containers with water and then draw some off and take it to the chief steward. After tasting it, the steward remarked to the bridegroom that instead of following the custom of serving the good wine first and the lesser wine after the guests’ tastes had been dulled, they had held the best for last.

Even though he spoke rudely to his mother, Jesus didn’t just do what Mary wanted, he made her happy by producing excellent quality wine. And thus Jesus began his rather short career by performing his first supernatural phenomenon not to support his proselytizing, but to please his mother.

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Weather and Climate and Space Lasers

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q – Georgia) postulated that Jewish bankers Rothschild, Inc. connived with Pacific Gas & Electric to shoot lasers from space, thus igniting the apocalyptic wildfires to clear space for California’s high-speed rail project. While Rep. Greene’s inanities were garnering headlines, real scientists confirmed that space hurricanes are a real thing.

Scientists had previously warned about the likelihood of space hurricanes, and their potential to wreak havoc on satellites. Now a real space hurricane has been documented. Researchers took satellite images from August 20, 2014 and used 3D imaging to recreate how the hurricane formed and behaved. A 600-mile-wide torrent of plasma had hovered in the Earth’s upper atmosphere over the North Pole. The storm spun counterclockwise for about eight hours, generating spiral-shaped arms, spewing electrons instead of water, before it finally dissipated.

Scientists conjecture that space hurricanes are caused by an “unusually large and rapid transfer of solar wind energy and charged particles into the Earth’s upper atmosphere.” Researchers studying these phenomena say the resulting storms are not uncommon and should be monitored in real time, not six years after the fact. They foresee increasing interference with satellites, disrupting GPS and other communications.

Meanwhile, here on earth, scientists have been measuring the Gulf Stream, known formally as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), since 2004. The Gulf Stream’s powerful ocean current brings warm waters from the Gulf of Mexico into the Atlantic Ocean, past the east coast of the United States, and on to western Europe, altering the climate along its way. It even affects the weather on the western coast of Africa. The current keeps temperatures in these areas warmer during the winter months and helps to cool and regulate heat during the summer.

Using “proxy data” (everything from ships’ logs, to records of ice cores, ocean sediments, and corals collected over time) they can reconstruct the behaviors of the stream back as far as the year 400.

A new study tells us the Gulf Stream is rapidly weakening. It’s now the weakest it’s been in a thousand years.

The reason? Yep, you guessed it: human-caused climate change. Researchers say before the year 2100, melting ice floes will weaken the current and likely will result in rapidly rising sea levels on the U.S. east coast and more intense weather events in Europe, as in increasingly extreme heat waves, and a decrease in summer rainfall.

So here’s another something to worry about. You’re welcome.

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