10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List - Neatorama

The media is full of scare stories, but everything is relative. The New York Times give you the lowdown on ten things that you shouldn't bother worrying abut on your vacation.

Now, I can’t guarantee you that any of these worries is groundless, because I can’t guarantee you that anything is absolutely safe, including the act of reading a newspaper. With enough money, an enterprising researcher could surely identify a chemical in newsprint or keyboards that is dangerously carcinogenic for any rat that reads a trillion science columns every day.

What I can guarantee is that I wouldn’t spend a nanosecond of my vacation worrying about any of these 10 things:

I just got home from my vacation, and I forgot the sunscreen, ate a hot dog, and drove around with the windows down AND the A/C on! Link -Thanks, Duke!

(image credit: Viktor Koen)

Update 7/30/08 by Alex: Treehugger has a "rebuttal" of this John Tierney article: Link - Thanks Chris!

Comments (29)

Newest 5

Newest 5 Comments

whew!!!!
I was really worried about #7
;)

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6. Toxic plastic bottles. "Dose makes the poison."

OK, so I guess the Coke can have cocaine again...

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They debunked the myth of driving with your windows uses more gas versus using a/c on MythBusters. The truck driving with the a/c on ran out of gas much more quickly than the truck driving with the windows down. Both of my cars go quite a bit farther on a tank when I don't use a/c as well so I don't think their experiment was a fluke.

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Evil Pundit,

Because they're significantly less well paid than the oil/energy companies?

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Brachinus, climate change fearmongering is a huge industry. Why should I believe their shills?

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Natural gas has no odor. The "smell" of natural gas is added so that it can be smelled. The chemical, methyl mercaptan or methanetiol, occurs naturally in bad breath, feces, things like that (and in small amounts in some natural gasses). In fact, if you've even smelled a strange smell in your urine after eating asparagus, you have smelled this chemical. So, it was chosen as an additive because our olfactory systems are incredibly sensitive to it!

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In a city of about 50,000 residents, assuming the gas company printed 50,000 of these cards, the gas company wasted fifty per cent of these cards and tossed them out. If they were 25 cents apiece, then $6,250 was tossed out. That would pay my gas bill for about six years. Dang.

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