Man Camp

The NYT profiled a boom town in North Dakota that's attracting men to work the oil industry.  

"LAST spring, Bob Ripka decided the time had come for drastic change. His once-robust income from his job at a printing company was dwindling. His family lost its house in the real estate crash. And employment prospects around his home in Pine City, Minn., more than an hour north of Minneapolis, appeared scant.

He heard talk around town about plentiful work in North Dakota, where new drilling technologies are driving an oil boom. “And I decided, ‘Well, I’m going to go make some money,’ ” he recalled in an interview. So on Memorial Day weekend, Mr. Ripka, 48, removed the rear seats from his 2003 Dodge minivan and replaced them with a mattress. He threw some clothes in a bag, said goodbye to his family and drove 10 hours west to Williston — ground zero in the North Dakota petroleum explosion.

After filling out a round of applications and sleeping in his car for several nights, Mr. Ripka was offered a job driving heavy trucks for an oil services company, helping to pour cement to secure casings for new wells."

It's really just an article about men, who have been hardest hit by the Great Recession.  The article gave me the same feeling as looking at these old photos from the Depression.  The dignity of work.  It kind of makes me fall in love with my country all over again.

The one thing I don't like about the article is that the Times refers to it as "Man Camp".  I realize that it's short and catchy, and I'm not going to read too much into it.  But these days, the word "camp" sounds trivial, and associated with summer camp, a carefree childhood, or camping in the woods.  Or it sounds like some lame-ass retreat for emasculated push-overs to learn "how to be a man".  Leaving your family for weeks or months at a time is not fun.  There is nothing carefree about it.

At the same time, I'm pretty sure that Williston, North Dakota is a far cry from the "Man Camps" of the American West, building the transcontinental railroad, or a Civil War military campaign -- or basically, any significant construction project, military installation, or frontier town throughout all of human history.  Because that's what men do.  Build stuff and take risks.  (And fight.)

The real story is that the Times can make it through this article without once mentioning the Keystone Pipeline.  These energy and construction projects are perfect jobs for men.  And they disproportionately benefit low status men, the forgotten people of history.

Are there good viruses?

A fascinating article in Wired documents the search for a broad-based attack against viruses.

Virologists, in other words, are still waiting for their Penicillin Moment. But they might not have to wait forever. Buoyed by advances in molecular biology, a handful of researchers in labs around the US and Canada are homing in on strategies that could eliminate not just individual viruses but any virus, wiping out viral infections with the same wide-spectrum efficiency that penicillin and Cipro bring to the fight against bacteria. If these scientists succeed, future generations may struggle to imagine a time when we were at the mercy of viruses, just as we struggle to imagine a time before antibiotics.

But will there be drawbacks to success?  Just like antibiotics killed bacteria indiscriminately -- good and bad bacteria both -- might we be killing off beneficial viruses too?

Our bodies are rife not just with bacteria but with viruses too. Even when we’re perfectly healthy, we have trillions of viruses inside of us. Scientists are only beginning to survey this viral ecology, but some suspect that it may actually be essential to our health. Many animals depend on viruses. Aphids, for example, need a virus that makes a toxin that prevents wasps from laying eggs inside their bodies. Scientists have found that infecting mice with lymphotrophic viruses protects them from developing diabetes. Other viruses attack cancer cells.

We may have such beneficial viruses inside our own bodies as well, waiting to be discovered. These viruses may not even infect our own cells but could instead be inside the bacteria that colonize us. Some species might keep the populations of their microbial hosts in check, like predators thinning a herd. Some viruses merge with bacteria rather than killing them, providing their hosts with useful genes for feeding or fighting off competitors. All of these microbe-infecting viruses may ultimately help us stay healthy.

It’s conceivable that a broad-spectrum antiviral could devastate this complex, poorly understood biological jungle. As beneficial viruses disappeared, we might pay the price, developing diseases that the viruses used to keep at bay. Even Lingappa concedes that virus-killing could potentially go too far. “I don’t think we want to kill all viruses,” he says. “You only know about a virus when it does something bad. We’ve evolved with them. There’s probably some virus out there doing something good.”

Ten years from now, will we be referring to good viruses and bad viruses?  Probably.

File this under "very poorly understood aspects of health".  Here's the full article.

Broken contact form

My contact form has been broken for a little bit.  If you recently sent me something through it, assume I didn't get it.  If you sent me an email directly, then I did receive it.

You can email me at john [at] hunter-gatherer [dot] com.

Dwyane Wade runs barefoot

From a WSJ profile of Dwayne Wade's fitness regimen:

Mr. Wade also started running on the beach this summer. "Running on the sand strengthens your quads and calf muscles," he says. He adds that he used to avoid running because it gave him shin splints, but running barefoot in the sand has helped him avoid that.

His diet appears to avoid some industrial foods, but seems to adhere to low-fat diet dogma.

Mr. Wade says he always avoided vegetables until he turned 30. "I hated all of them," he says. But "I knew it would help me in the long run both mentally and physically" to start eating them. His solution was to have his personal chef turn them into juice.

He now starts the day with a juice that might include celery, carrots and beets. His chef sticks to healthy, low-fat, high-protein meals that often include grilled chicken and rice. He doesn't splurge often, but when he does he has a burger, fries and a Coke. "That is heaven to me. I have a favorite burger spot in nearly every city. Sometimes I might even order two."

Full article here, including the addition of yoga and pilates to his workout regimen.

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