Anyone who would buy a Personality Preserver neglects the fact that the worst personality destroyer is, in fact, aluminum (if that Alzheimer's theory is correct...I gave up on aluminum cookware years ago as a result of it).

I still like the theory (and it isn't mine, nor the occultists') that we don't see intelligent life in the universe because we don't know where or how to look for anything that didn't follow the same course of evolution that we did.

Eric Klein, of course, overlooks the fact that he isn't any more likely than anybody else to discern the real hazards that will inevitably come.

The statistically improbable gets us every time, though sometimes the statistically probable is enough. I've been re-reading Czeslaw Milosz's account of how everybody with any common sense in Poland between the wars knew that Europe was fated for complete catastrophe within their lifetimes...and responded by burrowing ever more deeply into their meaningless jobs at Polish Radio, polishing further the practice of the avant-garde theatre, or spending 1939 looking for the perfect apartment.

Maybe they should have been devising Personality Protectors.

Edited at 2010-07-21 05:12 pm (UTC)

I'm missing the joke, or you missed mine. Remind me why the mercury-poisoned Mad Hatter (a real one, not Lewis Carroll's) would argue that refraining from ingesting aluminum doesn't help. Or being aware that we are hit by the statistically improbable more often than we think and clueless when we ought not to be doesn't help. Or at least that such awareness would help a great deal more than wearing any kind of Personality Protector would.

I know I'm being dense. But I don't get the joke. And this bothers me.

In fact, the real problem with fears about aluminum is its very nature as an incredibly slow reactant. It oxidizes so slowly that you're very unlikely to get any in your system, much less have any accumulate after even a lifetime of use. An aluminum can might take thousands of years to oxidize, as opposed to dozens for tin or steel. It may be quite toxic, but it has to actually get in you first, and it's one of the least reactant metals (which is one reason why it's used for cans and cooking).

Edited at 2010-07-21 06:14 pm (UTC)

I've never heard that in particular, so there might be something in it about chemical reactions that lift aluminum from the cookery. On the face of it, though, it sounds more like a wive's tale. Why not worry more about iron goods that rust and corrode far more easily, or copper?

Guess what? All of the well-known gemstones besides (purified) diamonds contain aluminum. Rubies are in fact a form of aluminum rust.

Arrid XXtra Dry, with aluminum dechlohydrate, sprayed directly onto your pourous underarms into your lymph system every day and night for years. i used to remember i smelled good....

I've always thought that intelligent life developing in an extraterrestrial ocean would be undetectable by us. It wouldn't put out the radio waves that the SETI people believe MUST be produced by any highly developed intelligent species.

Also -- intelligence evolving under permanent cloud cover, being unable to see and entirely uninterested in What's Out There. To say nothing of intelligence arriving at Zen renunciation before evolving its first engineer. I think the SETI people can;t really imagine that intelligent life need not produce engineers.

I can't resist noting that my posting was interrupted by an ad for Clearasil followed by a captcha, "the watcher." Hmm. RC