Makeup and baby powder; face and butt. We love talc, or more specifically, talcum powder, a finely ground form of Mg3Si4O10(OH)2, a silicate mineral. Of course, there are the suspected and presumably demonstrated carcinogenic dangers, but, hey, everything is bad for you in some way, isn’t it? And, hey, also, isn’t it true that some talc has associated asbestos, making it a potential source of mesothelioma? “What’s that you’re putting on your face, Honey?” And “What are we going to do about the baby’s persistent diaper rash?”
Yes, we have long tended to use natural products or enhanced natural products before we knew of their potential harm. We’ve done the same with artificial products like those tens of thousands of chemicals we all carry around in our bones and flesh, chemicals that we only recently synthesized and, we like to believe, innocently cast into our environment. Look, who in Japan knew ahead of time what would happen to the people of Minamata because of methyl mercury poisoning dumped into the bay? Okay, maybe some knew, but generally, most of the environmental damage, the poisons, the tens of thousands of synthesized and natural compounds, entered the environment through ignorance, sometimes well-intentioned ignorance. Like that talcum powder for face and bottom. Works, doesn’t it. Absorbs oils. Dry lubricates as well as graphite without the black pencil powder.
And now we’ve found a comet covered in talcum powder, well, more specifically in phyllosilicates. Yeah, something like a big baby bottom hurtling through space, even came relatively close to Earth, just a few million kilometers away at one point. Eight football fields in diameter, Comet P/2016 BA14, tells the tale that Earth by itself isn’t the only place where subtle dangers lie. The universe is filled with unhealthful compounds. The universe is filled with dangers, many of them masked in beauty, like those makeups composed of microscopic slippery sheets of phyllosilicate molecules we call talc.
But notice your tendency to infer. You almost never give those chemical dangers a thought. You infer a safety when you can’t see a danger, even a danger that envelopes you, or your face, or you butt. You infer that you will not be hit by a talcum powder comet today. You infer that your chair will hold your mass, that the floor will support your weight, and that the predicted tornado will not hit your house to sweep you away to Oz.
We have to live our lives with an underpinning of inference. Otherwise, we would spend all our moments in a constant anxiety. “Will the chair continue to hold me? Will the chair continue to hold me? Should I worry I use makeup? Did I kill the baby by using baby powder to prevent diaper rash? “DID I KILL THE BABY?”
Here’s a personal story. My father lived 97 years; my mother, 95. Now, admittedly, the last six years—they died the same year—of their lives were not their most vigorous. Macular degeneration prevented him from walking a daily five miles of a hilly golf course, a two-decade hobby he had with his buddies after he retired and that included going to one another’s homes for a late morning Irish coffee. In their nineties both parents gradually became weaker, their last year’s mobility limited to wheel-chair travel. Both had been smokers until they were in their sixties. Unfiltered cigarettes for decades, mind you. Both grew up in houses whose walls had both asbestos plasters and lead paints. Both breathed the coal soot spewed from western Pennsylvania’s chimneys. Both consumed processed meats. Both lived through the Great Depression, relative poverty, and, for him, the battle on Okinawa during which many of his fellow Marines died. Both had a good work ethic. But he daily worked with printer’s ink and lead-based metals because he was a linotypist until he switched to computer-driven printing where he worked. Her ironing board was covered with an asbestos cloth to prevent fires, a fact I discovered as a little child when I asked why the iron didn’t set the cloth on fire. I remember visiting one day when they were in their late 80s or early 90s. My father asked, “Do we have salami for lunch?” She replied, “No, that’s in the refrigerator downstairs for next week. We have baloney for today.” Of course, that was served on white bread. Now, there’s a health-food story that will drive millennials to overdose on green tea.
But before you run to the health-food store, realize that those people born before the Spanish Flu killed millions, learned as the twentieth century passed, the gradual lessons of the times, that some things once thought beneficial were, in fact, not as beneficial as they were supposed. Know also the common lot of people: That Camel once boasted that a high percentage of doctors preferred its cigarettes over the other brands, demonstrating that the “educated” class were as ignorant as their “uneducated” contemporaries.** Did my parents smoke? Yes, in fact, he smoked Camels for years, and I knew doctors who smoked. “Horrors!” you exclaim as you rush to the nearest Whole Foods for solace in your electric vehicle with all the poisons, like lithium and cobalt, that its batteries contain.
So, all those who currently infer that electric cars are better for both humanity and planet Earth, might have some learning curve ahead of them, from the peak of which they might look back to the uphill slope of environmental hazards over which they recently climbed to their present inferences. What’s next? A commercial that proclaims that more doctors drive electric cars than those who drive cars with internal combustion engines? ***
Might my parents have lived into their 100s had they lived a different lifestyle? It’s possible. But, then, anyone can be hit by a truck, even a healthy jogger. Good genes in my parents? Maybe. Certainly, talcum-powder-based makeups never did her in. Lead poisoning, or asbestos, or coal dust, leaded gasolines, or all the environmental hazards of the twentieth century didn’t seem to have much of an effect on their almost 100-year-old bodies. Heck, even when macular degeneration prevented him from seeing a golf ball well enough to hit it, he rolled the high score, 287, for his bowling league.
Maybe every so often each of us should examine our many inferences for their truth. Sorry, I guess I gave you a thought you won’t be able to shake today, the thought that maybe your chair, your floor, or even your ceiling might not be what you think it is. Sit well, my friend, sit well. Some inferences seem to be necessary for sanity.
Notes:
*National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. 6 April 2021. Exploring comet thermal history: Burnt-out comet covered with talcum powder. https://phys.org/news/2021-04-exploring-comet-thermal-history-burnt-out.html Accessed April 6, 2021. Takafumi Ootsubo, Hideyo Kawakita, Yoshiharu Shinnaka, Mid-infrared observations of the nucleus of comet “/2016 BA14 (PANSTARRS). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103521001093?via%3Dihub
**See an example commercial at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAB04wkCxqw Accessed April 6, 2021.
*** Williams, Thomas D., Ph.D., 29 June 2020. UN warns of devastating environmental side effects of electric car boom. https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2020/06/29/u-n-warns-of-devastating-environmental-side-effects-of-electric-car-boom-2/ Accessed April 6, 2021.
Yes, we have long tended to use natural products or enhanced natural products before we knew of their potential harm. We’ve done the same with artificial products like those tens of thousands of chemicals we all carry around in our bones and flesh, chemicals that we only recently synthesized and, we like to believe, innocently cast into our environment. Look, who in Japan knew ahead of time what would happen to the people of Minamata because of methyl mercury poisoning dumped into the bay? Okay, maybe some knew, but generally, most of the environmental damage, the poisons, the tens of thousands of synthesized and natural compounds, entered the environment through ignorance, sometimes well-intentioned ignorance. Like that talcum powder for face and bottom. Works, doesn’t it. Absorbs oils. Dry lubricates as well as graphite without the black pencil powder.
And now we’ve found a comet covered in talcum powder, well, more specifically in phyllosilicates. Yeah, something like a big baby bottom hurtling through space, even came relatively close to Earth, just a few million kilometers away at one point. Eight football fields in diameter, Comet P/2016 BA14, tells the tale that Earth by itself isn’t the only place where subtle dangers lie. The universe is filled with unhealthful compounds. The universe is filled with dangers, many of them masked in beauty, like those makeups composed of microscopic slippery sheets of phyllosilicate molecules we call talc.
But notice your tendency to infer. You almost never give those chemical dangers a thought. You infer a safety when you can’t see a danger, even a danger that envelopes you, or your face, or you butt. You infer that you will not be hit by a talcum powder comet today. You infer that your chair will hold your mass, that the floor will support your weight, and that the predicted tornado will not hit your house to sweep you away to Oz.
We have to live our lives with an underpinning of inference. Otherwise, we would spend all our moments in a constant anxiety. “Will the chair continue to hold me? Will the chair continue to hold me? Should I worry I use makeup? Did I kill the baby by using baby powder to prevent diaper rash? “DID I KILL THE BABY?”
Here’s a personal story. My father lived 97 years; my mother, 95. Now, admittedly, the last six years—they died the same year—of their lives were not their most vigorous. Macular degeneration prevented him from walking a daily five miles of a hilly golf course, a two-decade hobby he had with his buddies after he retired and that included going to one another’s homes for a late morning Irish coffee. In their nineties both parents gradually became weaker, their last year’s mobility limited to wheel-chair travel. Both had been smokers until they were in their sixties. Unfiltered cigarettes for decades, mind you. Both grew up in houses whose walls had both asbestos plasters and lead paints. Both breathed the coal soot spewed from western Pennsylvania’s chimneys. Both consumed processed meats. Both lived through the Great Depression, relative poverty, and, for him, the battle on Okinawa during which many of his fellow Marines died. Both had a good work ethic. But he daily worked with printer’s ink and lead-based metals because he was a linotypist until he switched to computer-driven printing where he worked. Her ironing board was covered with an asbestos cloth to prevent fires, a fact I discovered as a little child when I asked why the iron didn’t set the cloth on fire. I remember visiting one day when they were in their late 80s or early 90s. My father asked, “Do we have salami for lunch?” She replied, “No, that’s in the refrigerator downstairs for next week. We have baloney for today.” Of course, that was served on white bread. Now, there’s a health-food story that will drive millennials to overdose on green tea.
But before you run to the health-food store, realize that those people born before the Spanish Flu killed millions, learned as the twentieth century passed, the gradual lessons of the times, that some things once thought beneficial were, in fact, not as beneficial as they were supposed. Know also the common lot of people: That Camel once boasted that a high percentage of doctors preferred its cigarettes over the other brands, demonstrating that the “educated” class were as ignorant as their “uneducated” contemporaries.** Did my parents smoke? Yes, in fact, he smoked Camels for years, and I knew doctors who smoked. “Horrors!” you exclaim as you rush to the nearest Whole Foods for solace in your electric vehicle with all the poisons, like lithium and cobalt, that its batteries contain.
So, all those who currently infer that electric cars are better for both humanity and planet Earth, might have some learning curve ahead of them, from the peak of which they might look back to the uphill slope of environmental hazards over which they recently climbed to their present inferences. What’s next? A commercial that proclaims that more doctors drive electric cars than those who drive cars with internal combustion engines? ***
Might my parents have lived into their 100s had they lived a different lifestyle? It’s possible. But, then, anyone can be hit by a truck, even a healthy jogger. Good genes in my parents? Maybe. Certainly, talcum-powder-based makeups never did her in. Lead poisoning, or asbestos, or coal dust, leaded gasolines, or all the environmental hazards of the twentieth century didn’t seem to have much of an effect on their almost 100-year-old bodies. Heck, even when macular degeneration prevented him from seeing a golf ball well enough to hit it, he rolled the high score, 287, for his bowling league.
Maybe every so often each of us should examine our many inferences for their truth. Sorry, I guess I gave you a thought you won’t be able to shake today, the thought that maybe your chair, your floor, or even your ceiling might not be what you think it is. Sit well, my friend, sit well. Some inferences seem to be necessary for sanity.
Notes:
*National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. 6 April 2021. Exploring comet thermal history: Burnt-out comet covered with talcum powder. https://phys.org/news/2021-04-exploring-comet-thermal-history-burnt-out.html Accessed April 6, 2021. Takafumi Ootsubo, Hideyo Kawakita, Yoshiharu Shinnaka, Mid-infrared observations of the nucleus of comet “/2016 BA14 (PANSTARRS). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103521001093?via%3Dihub
**See an example commercial at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAB04wkCxqw Accessed April 6, 2021.
*** Williams, Thomas D., Ph.D., 29 June 2020. UN warns of devastating environmental side effects of electric car boom. https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2020/06/29/u-n-warns-of-devastating-environmental-side-effects-of-electric-car-boom-2/ Accessed April 6, 2021.
RSS Feed