If arranging a bpb book read wasn’t a nigh-improbable task, I would say we should put our eyes and minds to this book I saw in this review.
One day in the middle of the 17th century, the very last tree on Easter Island was cut down. An island which had once been blessed with forests containing many types of tree, including the largest species of palm known to man, was now reduced to bare grassland and volcanic desert. Despite increasing problems with soil erosion, the islanders could still grow some crops, such as yams and sugarcane; but fishing at sea became almost impossible, because there was no new timber for boat-building.
…
One cannot read about this – one of many case-histories of social and environmental collapse discussed in Jared Diamond’s new book – without asking the question: what went through the mind of the person who cut down that last tree? It is almost impossible to think of an answer – unless he was imagining that one final sacrifice to the gods would be rewarded with a miraculous new forest. But perhaps the tree was old and diseased; perhaps its last seedlings had failed. The more troubling question, surely, concerns the period just before: why, when there was still a small but viable stock of trees, did the islanders continue to destroy them?
It’s got a weird interface and name but I think we’ve all been waiting for a device like the iCopulate.
Exercise induced shortness of breath not always Asthma
Uh, could it be, I dunno, exercise?
In the study, the most common cause of exercise-induced dyspnea was simply that the patients had reached their natural limits for exercising, and their shortness of breath was an entirely normal response to vigorous exercise. Despite the varying levels of cardiovascular conditioning for the 74 patients in this group, each patient had interpreted their normal physiologic shortness of breath as being abnormal.
Not sure if it could be explained much more clearly than this.=
(Thanks to Green Knight)