According to the iron hypothesis, sprinkling iron into low-chlorophyll regions of the ocean would create large algal blooms. Oceanographer John Martin argued that large-scale iron enrichment could grow enough algae in the oceans to absorb carbon from the atmosphere and reverse the greenhouse effect. “Give me half a tanker of iron,” he famously said in 1988, “and I will give you an ice age.”
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Miscellany
Seneca the Younger tells of Hostius Quadra, who installed mirrors in his bedroom to reflect distorted images. “He relished the exaggerated endowment of his own organ as much as if it were real,” Seneca complained. Quadra confirmed: “If I could,” he said, “I’d have that size in the flesh; since I can’t, I’ll feast on the fantasy.”
In 1387 the physicians to Charles II of Navarre, in order to treat his illness, soaked his sheets in aqua vitae, a distilled wine, and wrapped him in them to enhance the curative power that the liquid was supposed to possess. The sheets were then sewn shut by a maid, who, instead of cutting the final bit of string, set a candle to it. The alcohol-soaked king went up in a blaze and the maid ran away, leaving him to burn to death.
“Don’t take mother’s milk—it’s for young calves,” reads a medieval poem by the blind ascetic al-Maarri, “or thick white honey…the bees didn’t make it just to give it away!” In al-Maarri’s Epistle of the Horse and the Mule, the titular horse complains of “torture from the sons of Eve” and Bedouins’ cruelty toward the “tribes of equus”: “Our lot is to have hardships thrown around our necks and heaped onto our backs!”
“It was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote of his failed 1965 master’s thesis in anthropology, in which he argued that the plots of stories, when graphed, conform to a set of standard patterns. “The apathy of the University of Chicago is repulsive to me. They can take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooooooon.”
Roman physician Galen recounted a debate from which a medical rival “departed in a big hurry, knowing, I imagine, that if he remained he would be proved wrong.” Galen then wrote a book to be delivered to the rival’s followers. “You walked away,” it reads, “behaving like an athletic competitor who seizes the crown and flees before the contest; but today you will not escape refutation, for this book will follow you.”
Sherwood Anderson died in 1941 of peritonitis, having swallowed a toothpick at a party. He was sixty-four. Tennessee Williams choked to death on a plastic eye-drop cap at a hotel in 1983. He was seventy-one.
When the British Petroleum oil rig Deepwater Horizon was forced to shut down temporarily because of a gas surge, one engineer tried to persuade his colleagues that a liner was required to secure the pipe. The proposal, which would have cost about $7 million, was rejected by management. “This has been a nightmare well which has everyone all over the place,” the engineer wrote to a colleague. Six days later, on April 20, 2010, the rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico and spilled more than four million barrels of oil before it was capped almost three months later.
While conducting research in the remote Iranian region of Khuzestan in the 1970s, folklorist Grace Goodell found that villagers refused to hunt any “unusual” migratory birds that stopped in the area for only a few days, believing them to be performing a hajj pilgrimage. Based on migration patterns, the birds may indeed pass over Mecca on their way to Africa, Goodell noted, although “probably few actually winter by the house of God.”
According to Pliny, after an oracle predicted Aeschylus would die from being hit by a falling house, the poet began “trusting himself only under the canopy of the heavens.” His precaution was futile; he was killed that day when hit by a tortoise dropped from the sky by a hungry eagle eager to crack open its shell.
In March 2018 authorities in Alexandria, Egypt, began removing five hundred residents from their homes along the Al Mahmoudeya canal—dug in 1820 under orders from Viceroy Mohamed Ali—and into high-rises. “There are many areas,” says Alexandrian climate scientist Mohamed El Raey, “that are located at least three meters below sea level. They will have to be abandoned and the people relocated.” Estimates suggest near-term rise in sea levels will inundate a third of the city.
Southern women during the Civil War chewed on newspapers, believing an ingredient in the ink whitened their faces.
Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens, Henry Fielding Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton Dickens, Walter Landor Dickens, and Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens were among the names of Charles Dickens’ sons. Among the brothers of Walter Whitman were George Washington Whitman, Andrew Jackson Whitman, and Thomas Jefferson Whitman.
Friendship cannot exist “between the well-fed, prosperous / and the lean and down-and-out in the world,” states the Panchatantra, a collection of Indian animal fables from around the third century bc. In one story, when a crow tries to befriend a mole after witnessing his impressive skill in escaping from hunters’ traps, the mole exclaims, “You are the eater; I am the food. What kind of friendship can exist between us?”
The Communist Party of China considered “revolution in mind” a prerequisite for political emancipation in the 1940s. Work reports tell of “speaking bitterness” sessions—in which peasants would share stories of their oppression—sometimes referred to as “turn-over-mind meetings.” The meetups later served as inspiration for feminist consciousness-raising groups in the United States during the 1970s.