Say cheese.

In the news this morning: New research links smoking and cognitive decline. Actually, the headline used the term “brain rot.” Because the reporter probably smokes, and, you know, syllables. Simultaneously, other research suggests that certain psoriasis drugs may actually slow the process of dementia. So are you thinking what I'm thinking? Probably not. Because I'm thinking Noxema cigarettes. They can't taste any worse than Kools, and will leave your lung cilia lustrous and easy to manage. Actually, the research only shows reduced dementia in mice, not people. How can they tell? What does a mouse really have to remember?

A man needs a dream.

The Pencil Museum is located in England, at Keswick, Cumbria, the site of historic graphite mines and the place where the first graphite pencils were manufactured. I enjoy pencils, and I like to think that I utilize them in a responsible and appropriate manner. But the distance between my home and the Pencil Museum is in excess of 4,000 miles, many of them over the justly famous Atlantic Ocean, creating a serious impediment to ambulation. So a casual visit is out of the question. It's something to be planned for, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Like the Hajj, but much, much sillier.

Cocooning

I live a half block from a kindergarten playground. On warm days, the sound of 5-year olds at play drifts into my yard. It's prettier than wind chimes. Real estate ads should include it as a selling point. Here's an odd thought. Over a billion years or so, the tremendous pressures found about 100 miles down in the cratonic lithosphere can turn normal dingy looking carbon-bearing rocks into lustrous diamonds. With humans, it's the other way around. We start out bright and shiny and over time we become dull lumps. How unfair, to be born butterflies and turn into worms.

I've been very, very good.

You know that good feeling you get when you do something nice? That’s a kind of vanity, right? Whether it’s Bill Gates handing out billions for the Betterment of All Mankind, or me remembering to dim my headlights on a winding nighttime mountain road, nothing feels better than knowing you’re the Good Guy. So being the recipient of a good deed is an act of charity. Therefore, we should all strive to be worthy of the good deeds of others. This may involve sacrifices like allowing people to wait on you hand and foot. That’s something to feel proud of.

Oh. And also, get off my lawn.

Apparently, somewhere in Ohio there's a single solitary mope so feeble-minded to as yet have no presidential preference. That's the vote they're going to spend a combined $1 billion to influence. It's like betting big bucks on where a chicken will crap. Me, I voted already. I got a little sticker that says “I voted early.” Shouldn't I now be exempt from campaign coverage? Seriously, this is like having all the news you want to read or hear preempted by nonstop professional wrestling. Not actual matches. Just the parts where fat guys grab the mike and shout themselves hoarse.

Breathe Easy

William Fisk of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has studied the effect of CO2 levels on cognition. Outdoors, normal carbon dioxide levels are 350 to 400 parts-per-million (PPM). Indoors, 600 PPM is considered excellent, and 1,000 is normal. Fisk gave his subjects a bunch of cognitive tests in increasing CO2 concentrations. And the more carbon dioxide they breathed, the dumber they got. 1,000 PPM was bad enough, but up around 2,500 they got positively moronic, basically incapable of rational thought. Thank goodness you only get levels like that when folks are jammed together in a board room or legislative chamber.

Scaling the heights

Dang. This guy takes a balloon higher than anybody ever, then jumps off. Here's one way to visualize the distance he covered. Imagine you're so vast that to you the world looks the size of a basketball. You're hovering there in space next to Basketball Earth, and maybe 8 yards away hangs a baseball-sized gray stone: the Moon. If you lean way in, your vast, cool, and unsympathetic eye can detect satellites in low-Earth orbit, about one centimeter from the surface. And from this perspective, Felix Baumgartner dove from a height of around one millimeter, 39 thousandths of an inch.