Attention college juniors! Right now you’re enjoying summer weather¹, settling into your subleased apartment², and getting ready to make some dough from that sinecure of a resume-padding internship.

A couple of nights ago I saw a NOVA show about rats. It was terrifying. Here’s why:

Okay. That may be a bit dramatized, but I think it gets the gist of the conflict and that stakes involved.

Every 48 years Black Rats flood across rice fields in northeastern India devouring all food in sight resulting in famines and deaths. This is because every 48 years a certain specie of bamboo flowers and drops fruits. The rats, encouraged by an overabundance of food, start breeding like it’s the end of the world. A single female can give birth to 200 babies in half a year. Octomom, eat your heart out.

When the bamboo fruits are gone, the rats turn to rice grown by Indian subsistence farmers. This cyclical ecological phenomenon is called Mautam. In 1958 the resulting famine killed several hundred people. You can watch the entire NOVA episode here. The story follows one scientist’s efforts to discover the times of rat reproduction waves by tracking footprint frequencies and setting traps. I wonder if there are better ways to track and quantify these reproduction pulses to better inform the subsistence farmers about when to plant and harvest their crops. With the right information and planning, the farmers should be able to time when to plant (e.g. X days after the first bamboo flowering) and when to sow (e.g. when rat trap frequencies are Y). Add in a government safety net for unlucky villages and the farmers should do much better in the future.

A friend recently wrote to me that he’s having a great time trespassing in dangerous buildings undergoing construction. He even e-mailed some photographs of the floor plans he filched. Show-off.

An overheard conversation that confirmed my suspicions that the business school library isn’t a place where a lot of people go for serious studying but rather a meat market for MBAs and all other types of roaming academic bipeds.

My mother has kept detailed records of my height and weight since my birth. While growing up, my mother would stick a Post-it on a wall, call me over, ask me to stand up nice and straight, and mark my height. Then we would move to the scale. I considered this exercise a nuisance since I already did this at the doctor’s office. I didn’t know my mother kept a notebook where she meticulously recorded all this data – dozens of entries since I was two years old.

In my previous post, I talked about how I compared my childhood growth to the Center for Disease Control’s 2000 growth charts. Some questions I had while doing this:

It was the fall semester of my senior year at college. I wanted to light a candle and asked to borrow my suitemate’s zippo lighter. My candle was encased in a glass jar, and its wick was buried deep inside since I had used it frequently. Even holding the candle upside-down, the lighter’s flame barely reached the wick.

I had a bright idea. There were lots of old newspapers lying around my room. I would simply tear out a section, roll it into a tube, light the tube, and use the tube to light the wick. Unfortunately, I underestimated how fast newspapers burn. Feeling the flames from the lit newspaper roll biting at my fingers, I dropped the tube…into a trash can filled with more old newspapers.

Needless to say, the whole thing lit up faster than a Woodstock audience on 4/20. The newspapers were arranged in way that the flame could get all the oxygen it needed to grow. What started as a fire contained inside the trash can grew to 3 feet in 5 seconds. “This is bad,” I thought. It didn’t help that the trash can had mesh sides that fed even more oxygen to the flame which was now 4 feet tall.

Hearing expletives, my suitemate ran out of his room. He looked at the fire, then at me. I had been staring dumbly at the fire for a good 15 seconds. I simply didn’t know what to do. When I snapped out of it, I grabbed the nearest object, my suitemate’s cushion, and started beating the flame – which did absolutely nothing.

At this point, a friend whom I’d invited over to study for a final exam, had walked into the room. “Oh, hi Chris. Don’t mind the bonfire. Heater wasn’t working.”

Chris was much more rational than I was. He actually brought a fire extinguisher, but not until after my suitemate poured an entire jug of water into the trash can. We opened the windows, wiped the soot off the walls, and wondered whether it was a good thing that all of the smoke detectors in our suite remained silent.

idiocy’s aftermath

Lighter fluid stack of old newspapers fire conducive mesh trash can = 4ft high flames

Google Analytics is tool that allows me to track statistics about this blog. I just stick a tracking code into my webpages and wait for hits. I can see how many people visit my site within a certain time, how they get there, how long they stay, what browser they use, etc. Crazy, I know. I can spend hours looking at the data.

Facebook sent me an e-mail one day.

Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007

From: Facebook

To: David Xia

Subject: Facebook Warning

Hello. You uploaded a photo that violates our Terms of Use, and this photo has been removed. Among other things, photos containing nudity, drug use, or other obscene content are not allowed, nor are photos that attack an individual or group. Continued misuse of Facebook’s features could result in your account being disabled.

If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page at http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=33.

The Facebook Team