‌Eight

‌What Comes after the Colon?

In brief

‘Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh: Calculations on Avian Defaecation’

by Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow and Jozsef Gal (published in Polar Biology, 2003, and honoured with the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize in fluid dynamics)

‌Penguano, with ‘rectal pressure necessary to expel faecal material over a distance of 40 cm’

Some of what’s in this chapter: Some – but not all – call it waste • Cucumbers sans burp • Personal ammunition, within and then without tanks • Bean outcome surprise • Gods’ pollution • Addicted to cow dung fumes • What relative delight comes from your child • Child-parent feedback • How disgusting, please? • Eminence in rat-catching • Dog-savoured dreck • Cat-box smell-test chamber • Unbuild a tower • Finger-skills for nurses

Talking rubbish

When economists talk economics, some of them talk rubbish. Few mean it as plainly, as directly, as Alexi Savov. Savov wrote a study called ‘Asset Pricing with Garbage’, which filled twenty-four pages of the Journal of Finance early in 2011.

To Savov, garbage is valuable not only for its own worth, but because, in a mathematical sense, it represents many of the things that people and corporations treasure most. Maybe, just maybe, he implies, the rises and falls in garbage production reliably and fairly accurately measure what a society is worth. Savov, an assistant professor of finance at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, did the garbage research a few years earlier when he was still at the University of Chicago.

Economists struggle, always, to get a better mental grasp of the messy confusion known as ‘the economy’. Some economists are consumed with the economic concept called ‘consumption’. They want to know how much stuff – solids, liquids, gases, energy, services, whatever – get consumed during different years.

But these economists disagree violently about which stuff to measure. Savov’s garbage work takes its place in the long line of studies wrestling with the worth-versus-worthlessness of measuring all sorts of durable goods (cars, kettles), private goods (chocolate bars, gift copies of Fifty Shades of Grey), public goods (roads, statues of Margaret Thatcher), luxury goods (yachts, diamond bling), energy, services and whatnot.

Savov says he analysed ‘47 years of annual data from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) … I use municipal solid waste (MSW), or simply garbage, as a new measure of consumption. Virtually all forms of consumption produce waste, and they do so at the time of consumption. Rates of garbage generation should be informative about rates of consumption.’

Savovian garbage includes detritus from both homes and businesses. ‘Everyday items such as product packaging, grass clippings, furniture, clothes, bottles, food scraps, newspapers, appliances and batteries.’ It excludes materials, typified by construction waste and municipal wastewater treatment sludge, that are sent directly to landfills.

Savov checked his methods by applying them also to ten years of garbage data from nineteen European countries including the UK. He found the Euro-garbage econometric performance to be ‘consistent with the US results’.

His paper points out many subtleties in the relationship of garbage to things that his profession has traditionally tracked and esteemed – luxury goods, stocks and bonds – as indicators of the worth of our wealth. Garbage, he concludes, gives a solider, less often illusory, picture of the economy.

The final sentence of Savov’s study adds meaning to the old saying ‘garbage in, garbage out’. Savov writes: ‘The relative success of garbage as an alternative measure of consumption raises the possibility that the failure of the standard consumption-based model is due to a failure to measure consumption properly.’

Savov, Alexi (2011). ‘Asset Pricing with Garbage’. Journal of Finance 66 (1): 177–201.

Questioning burping

‘What Are Burpless Cucumbers?’ This apparently simple question is perplexing to many of the people who produce and sell the green, oblong objects. Todd C. Wehner, a professor of horticultural science at North Carolina State University, tried to clarify the matter by conducting an experiment. He fed burpless cucumbers to both burpable and burpless judges, then published his results in a study called ‘What Are Burpless Cucumbers?’

The marketplace offers conflicting information about burpless cucumbers. Some seed purveyors claim the word ‘burpless’ is just a synonym for ‘seedless’. Others, the Burpee seed company among them, blithely fudge on the matter. Burpee offers eight kinds of burpless cucumber, including one called Big Burpless Hybrid. Burpee says: ‘These varieties have almost no seed cavities for easier digestion.’

Methods and materials for ‘Burpiness Testing’

But some are confident about the vegetable’s burplessness.

The Thompson & Morgan seed catalogue, for example, offers (at the time of writing) the Burpless Tasty Green F1 variety at a price of £2.49 for a packet of ten seeds, with this assurance:

• Crops in: 58 Days
• Description: Yes, it’s true. No indigestion problems with this cucumber. Flavour is superb, crisp and delicious – anyone can eat it and they are very easy to grow.

Given this well-seeded disagreement and confusion, the community of cuke farmers, gardeners and consumers suffered. Todd C. Wehner saw the confusion, and acted.

The main objective of Wehner’s research, he writes in the rather awkwardly named journal Hortechnology, ‘was to determine whether oriental trellis cucumbers cause less burping when eaten’.

Wehner specializes in the study of cucurbits – the plant family whose siblings include cucumber, watermelon, cantaloupe and certain gourds. He is an acknowledged expert on watermelon DNA, on sex expression in luffa gourds, and on other matters that, throughout most of history, were utter mysteries. He took a straightforward approach to this new question.

‘It has been suggested by researchers that burpless cucumbers contain less of a burping compound … or are just the marketing term for oriental trellis cucumbers’, he writes. ‘The objective of this experiment is to determine whether oriental trellis cucumbers cause less burping when eaten.’

Wehner fed three kinds of cucumber to six judges. ‘Judges were grouped (three each) into susceptible or resistant, based on their previous experience with cucumbers. Fruits were evaluated for burpiness using six judges eating a 100-millimeter length of fruit per day. Burpiness was measured on a 0 to 9 scale … Ratings of burpiness were made within an hour of eating.’ The trials went on for three days. Upon sifting through his data, Wehner discovered that the judges who were susceptible to burping burped slightly less after eating the burpless cucumbers.

But this may not be the end of the story. Professor Wehner takes care to point out that ‘Additional research is needed on cucumbers of all types to identify cultivars that are free of burping for susceptible judges, and to identify the compound responsible for the burping effect.’

Wehner, Todd. C. (2000). ‘What Are Burpless Cucumbers?’. Hortechnology 10 (2): 317–20.

Research spotlight

‘Queasiness: An Informal Look’

by John W. Trinkaus (published in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1990)

Laying waste onto the enemy

Aleksandr Georgievich Semenov patented an efficiently disgusting weapon system. Using his method, soldiers inside an armoured tank, under battle conditions, can dispose of their biological waste products in an unwasteful way: encasing those materials, together with explosives, in artillery shells that they then fire at the enemy.

Semenov, residing in St Petersburg, can and does brag of having Russian patent no. 2,399,858, granted in 2009, officially titled ‘Method of Biowaste Removal from Isolated Dwelling Compartment of Military Facility and Device for Its Implementation’.

As patents go, it’s of modest length: twelve pages, with only two technical drawings. The original document is mostly in Russian. The prolific inventor (he has about two hundred other patents), sent me a full translation into English.

Figure 2 seems, at a glance, unremarkable: a cutaway side view of an artillery shell in its cartridge, tipped with a screw-in ‘nose cone’. There’s a large charge to (in Semenov’s description) ‘burst’ the shell, and a small charge to trigger that burst. The shell itself contains – indeed is mostly – a compartment for the payload.

Figure 1 is larger and more complex, showing the entire tank in cutaway side view. A single crewman perches inside. Beneath him, an empty shell collects the waste that emerges from his anus.

‌Figure 1

Here’s how the patent describes the scene, with numbers referring to specific items in the drawing: ‘A military man (3) puts the wastes (8) into the capacity (7) directly (fig.1) or in two steps. After it’s complete or, if it is necessary, incomplete filling the capacity is tightly sealed by the cover.’ The key action is in one sentence: ‘The gun charged with special projectile is targeted on a safety zone or on any enemy target which is worth for catching it.’

As the projectile leaves the tank, it removes what would eventually have become a source of stinking misery for the poor soldiers who, in combat, could be forced to remain sealed inside their vehicle for several days.

That misery transfers directly, forcefully away through the air, smacking into and dabbing onto the enemy.

This method of warfare aims to kill the enemy’s spirit and psyche. The patent conveys this fact in spirited, if not belletristic, language: ‘Except damaging factors, significance of which is secondary in this case, the military psychological positive effect takes place: comprehension of the facts of “delivering” and distribution on enemy territory (on equipment and uniform of an enemy) by the staff as well as the opportunity of informing other soldiers and the enemy about it. As a result, in addition to the basic purpose reaching (full wastes removal) additional military-psychological and military-political effects are achieved.’

Semenov, Aleksandr Georgievich (2009). ‘Method of Biowaste Removal from Isolated Dwelling Compartment of Military Facility and Device for Its Implementation’, Russian patent no. 2,399,858, 19 January.

May we recommend

‘Stool Substitute Transplant Therapy for the Eradication of Clostridium difficile Infection: “RePOOPulating” the Gut’

by Elaine O. Petrof, Gregory B. Gloor, Stephen J. Vanner, Scott J. Weese, David Carater, Michelle C. Daigneault, Eric M. Brown, Kathleen Schroeter and Emma Allen-Vercoe (published in Microbiome, 2013)

Overblown beans

‘People’s concerns about excessive flatulence from eating beans may be exaggerated.’ That conclusion emerges loud and clear at the end of a study published in the Nutrition Journal.

Donna Winham, of Arizona State University, and Andrea Hutchins, of the University of Colorado, call their report ‘Perceptions of Flatulence From Bean Consumption Among Adults in 3 Feeding Studies’. ‘Many consumers avoid eating beans because they believe legume consumption will cause excessive intestinal gas or flatulence’, they explain.

Winham and Hutchins had volunteers eat half a cup of beans daily. Every week everyone answered a questionnaire.

In the first week, fewer than half of the bean eaters reported increases in gas production. Then came a further surprise: ‘Seventy percent or more of the participants who experienced flatulence felt that it dissipated by the second or third week of bean consumption.’

Winham and Hutchins suggest that beans owe their unhappy reputation to ‘psychological anticipation of flatulence problems’.

‌A half cup of beans was consumed daily during the study period

Their opinion of 2011 is opposite, nearly, to one expressed by Geoffrey Wynne-Jones of Waikato Hospital in Hamilton, New Zealand, in 1975. Dr Wynn-Jones published a treatise in The Lancet, with the alarming title ‘Flatus Retention is the Major Factor in Diverticular Disease’.

Dr Wynne-Jones said: ‘Diverticular disease is confined to modern urban communities: flatus retention in a rural, primitive society would be pointless … [The disease] afflicts the cultured, the refined, the considerate … It should be recognised as originating in suppression of a normal bodily function.’

He declared that patients must ‘avoid “windy” foods’. He identified beans as a chief example of a ‘windy’ food.

Winham, Donna M., and Andrea M. Hutchins, ‘Perceptions of Flatulence From Bean Consumption Among Adults in 3 Feeding Studies’. Nutrition Journal 10 (128): n.p.

Wynne-Jones, Geoffrey (1975). ‘Flatus Retention is the Major Factor in Diverticular Disease’. Lancet 306 (7927): 211–2.

May we recommend

‘Childhood Constipation Is Not Associated with Characteristic Fingerprint Patterns’

by C.R. Jackson, B. Anderson and B. Jaffray (published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, 2003)

God-awful polluted waters

Do the gods pollute? Scientists in India, worried about the public health consequences of immersing idols in lakes and rivers, have been looking anew at water pollution. They hope, and perhaps in some cases pray, to harmonize their medical concerns with some people’s religious priorities.

Most of their research has focused on idols of the elephant-headed god Ganesh, created for the annual Ganesh Chaturthi celebration. Once a fairly quiet, mostly private practice, Ganesh Chaturthi now involves large, public festivals in many parts of the country. Researchers have also looked, a little, at the effects of immersing other idols, especially those of the many-armed goddess Durga.

One of the latest studies is called ‘Assessment of the Effects of Municipal Sewage, Immersed Idols and Boating on the Heavy Metal and Other Elemental Pollution of Surface Water of the Eutrophic Hussainsagar Lake (Hyderabad, India)’. A team sampled water repeatedly from different parts of the lake, including one spot ‘immersed with hundreds of multicolored idols of Lord Ganesh and Goddess Durga’, and another near ‘the outfall of black-colored, untreated raw sewage containing a collection of industrial effluents’. Sewage, they conclude, accounts for most but not all of the pollution. High levels of zinc, calcium and strontium ‘were probably due to the immersed idols painted with multicolors’.

Some studies concentrate on isolating the effects of idols from those of other sources. ‘Impact of Ganesh Idol Immersion Activities on the Water Quality of Tapi River, Surat (Gujarat) India’ tells of sampling the water ‘at morning hours during pre-immersion, during immersion and post-immersion periods of Ganesh idols’. The conclusion: the ‘main reason of the deterioration of water quality … is various religious activities’, with special blame given to ‘the plaster of paris, clothes, iron rods, chemical colours, varnish and paints used for making the idols’.

Several studies examined a lake in the city that suffered India’s most famous act of pollution: the 1984 chemical leak from a Union Carbide factory, which resulted in several thousand deaths.

Of particular note, ‘Heavy Metal Contamination Cause of Idol Immersion Activities in Urban Lake Bhopal, India’, published in 2007, finds that idol immersion has become ‘a major source of contamination and sedimentation to the lake water’. It warns that idol-derived heavy metals, especially nickel, lead and mercury, are likely to find their way into ‘fishes and birds inhabiting the lake, which finally reach the humans through food’. The authors want to ‘educate idol makers’ to make their idols small, of non-baked, quick-dissolving clay, and with ‘natural colors used in food products’.

Lord Ganesh versus Goddess Durga, as found in Hussainsagar Lake, Hyderabad, India (weight in tonnes)

Reddy, M. Vikram, K. Sagar Babu, V. Balaram and M. Satyanarayanan (2012). ‘Assessment of the Effects of Municipal Sewage, Immersed Idols and Boating on the Heavy Metal and Other Elemental Pollution of Surface Water of the Eutrophic Hussainsagar Lake (Hyderabad, India)’. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 184 (4): 2012, 1991–2000.

Ujjania, N.C. , and Azhar A. Multani (2011). ‘Impact of Ganesh Idol Immersion Activities on the Water Quality of Tapi River, Surat (Gujarat) India’. Research Journal of Biology 1 (1): 11–5.

Vyas, Anju, Avinash Bajpai, Neelam Verma and Savita Dixit (2007). ‘Heavy Metal Contamination Cause of Idol Immersion Activities in Urban Lake Bhopal, India’. Journal of Applied Sciences and Environment Management 11 (4): 37–9.

Bajpai, Avinash, Anju Vyas, Neelam Verma and D.D. Mishra (2008). ‘Effect of Idol Immersion on Water Quality of Twin Lakes of Bhopal with Special Reference to Heavy Metals’. Pollution Research 27 (3): 517–22.

Vyas, Anju, Avinash Bajpai and Neelam Verma (2008). ‘Water Quality Improvement after Shifting of Idol Immersion Site: A case study of Upper Lake, Bhopal, India’. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 145 (1/3): 437–43.

Aniruddhe, Mukerjee (n.d.). ‘A Case Study of Idol Immersion in the Context of Urban Lake Management Religious Activities and Management of Water Bodies’. Jabalpur Municipal Corporation, Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, India, http://parisaraganapati.net/archives/83.

In brief

‘Cow Dung Ingestion and Inhalation Dependence: A Case Report’

by Praveen Khairkar, Prashant Tiple and Govind Bang (published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 2009)

The authors, at Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences, Wardha, Maharashtra, India, report: ‘Although abuse of several unusual inhalants had been documented, addiction to cow dung fumes or their ashes has not been reported in medical literature as yet. We are reporting a case of cow dung dependence in ingestion and inhalational form.’

Nappy odours

When a mother compares and contrasts the stench from her baby’s nappies with that from those of someone else’s baby, the question of disgust arises. The question drove a team of psychologists to do an experiment. Richard Stevenson and Trevor Case, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and Betty Repacholi of the University of Washington in Seattle issued a report called ‘My Baby Doesn’t Smell As Bad As Yours: The Plasticity of Disgust’. It appeared in a 2006 issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

Stevenson, Case and Repacholi present their work as an addition to a body of earlier smelly investigation. Theirs accords, they say, with a ‘line of research on interpersonal preferences for armpit odour’. That old underarm research ‘reveals that we have a preference for our own body odours and those from close kin’.

For their experiment, the team crafted a simple procedure: ‘mothers of infants were presented with a series of trials in which they smelled concealed samples of their own baby’s faeces-soiled diaper and those of someone else’s baby.’ They tested thirteen mothers, whose productive little ones were aged between six and twenty-four months.

Each mother smelled the contents of a series of buckets. Each bucket housed a soiled diaper, with a special opening that ‘prevented participants from seeing the contents of the bucket, while allowing the odour to be sampled.’

The researchers inserted some twists. Sometimes a bucket would be labelled, saying its load came from a particular baby. Sometimes that label identified the wrong baby – thus posing a severe, almost unfair test of the mother’s power to discriminate her progeny’s output from all others.

The mothers knew their stuff. The Stevenson, Case, Repacholi report concludes that: ‘whether the stimuli were correctly labelled, mislabelled, or given no label, mothers rated their own baby’s soiled diaper as less disgusting than someone else’s baby’s diaper.’

The same team, but with Megan Oaten of Macquarie University in place of Repacholi, later examined disgust related to a different aspect of human intimacy: the sights, sounds, textures and odours emanating from step 1 of the baby-manufacturing process. That new report, called ‘Effect of Self-Reported Sexual Arousal on Responses to Sex-Related and Non-Sex-Related Disgust Cues’, was published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Stevenson, Case and Oaten share how (but not why) ninety-nine men agreed to subject themselves to whatever the team would ask them to see, hear, feel or smell. The whatever included images of a ‘scar on naked women’ and ‘pollution’; sounds of someone vomiting and of someone (presumably someone else) performing fellatio; textures comprised of cold pea and ham soup and four lubricated condoms; faecal odours and rotting-fish odours.

A few of the men had first looked at erotic images. Those sexually aroused men ‘reported being significantly less disgusted’ than the unaroused men by sex-related sights, sounds, feels and smells.

Case, Trevor I., Betty M. Repacholi and Richard J. Stevenson (2006). ‘My Baby Doesn’t Smell as Bad as Yours: The Plasticity of Disgust’. Evolution and Human Behavior 27 (5): 357–65.

Stevenson, Richard J., Trevor I. Case and Megan J. Oaten (2011). ‘Effect of Self-Reported Sexual Arousal on Responses to Sex-Related and Non-Sex-Related Disgust Cues’. Archives of Sexual Behavior 40 (1): 79–85.

In brief

‘Parental Consumption of Nestling Feces: Good Food or Sound Economics?’

by Peter L. Hurd, Patrick J. Weatherhead and Susan B. McRae (published in Behavioral Ecology, 1991)

Call for investigators

Which are more disgusting to touch – dry powders or slimy gels? A team of investigators from the department of psychology at the University of Miami set up a series of experiments to find out – bearing in mind that, until now, touch-related disgust responses have been largely overlooked in scholarly literature.

Participants touched substances of varying moistures, temperatures and consistencies, rating each on disgustingness. ‘Results show that participants rated wet stimuli and stimuli resembling biological consistencies as more disgusting than dry stimuli and stimuli resembling inanimate consistencies, respectively’, reported the researchers, led by Debra Lieberman, in ‘A Feel for Disgust: Tactile Cues to Pathogen Presence’ in the journal Cognition & Emotion.

Experimental subjects rated the materials in four categories:

• How disgusting

• How disgusting to put in mouth

• How willing to touch again

• How appealing

After correspondence with the authors, we are able to report the exact recipe for the ‘disgusting’ material used in this experiment. ‘The dough mixture was made using 2 cups of flour, 2 cups of water, 1 cup of salt, and 1 tablespoon of cream of tartar, yielding a consistency similar to Play-Doh. Each dough stimulus was formed into a fist-sized ball.’ The non-disgusting control material was cotton rope.

The authors note that new recipes may be required for future experiments: ‘Additional studies might select more mucoid, slimy and viscous textures rated as highly disgusting to examine the range of tactile properties associated with the disgust response.’ We now ask our readers to share their recipes for this scientific endeavour.

Send your recipe to marca@improbable.com with the subject line:

DISGUST PROTOCOL

The rat-catcher’s art

England’s professional rat-catching community produced at least two instructive books during the Victorian years.

Studies in the Art of Rat-Catching, by Henry C. Barkley, went on sale in London in 1896. Avowedly educational, it’s also a rambling entertainment that finishes up with this jolly sentiment: ‘I have heard from half a dozen head-masters of schools that they find the art of rat-catching is so distasteful to their scholars, and so much above their intellect, and so fatiguing an exercise to the youthful mind, that they feel obliged to abandon the study of it and replace it once more by those easier and pleasanter subjects, Latin and Greek.’

Two years later, Ike Matthews, in Manchester, published his Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-Catcher After 25 Years’ Experience. It is a more scholarly trove of professional knowledge about rat catchers and about economics.

High standards, Matthews maintains, are essential on the job. ‘I maintain that it is a profession, and one that requires much learning and courage. I have found this out when I have been under a warehouse floor, where a lot of Rats were in the traps, and I could not get one man out of 50 to come under the floor and hold the candle for me, not to mention helping me to take the live Rats out of the traps.’

The learned know that some risks are less dire than the public believes: ‘a good many people seem to think that if a man puts his hand into a bagful of Rats they will bite him, but I can assure you that a child could do the same thing and not be bitten. Should there be only two or three in the bag, then they will bite, but not in the event of there being a good number.’

One must acquire social skills to handle the occasional awkward moments. The rat catcher ‘sometimes experiences difficulties in travelling on the railway’, writes Matthews. ‘I have often entered an empty third-class carriage, sent my dog under the seat, and put the Rat cage there also. The carriage would fill with passengers, and upon reaching my destination I would take from under the seat my cage full of live Rats, to the amusement of some and the disgust of others.

‘I have also entered a railway carriage with my cage of rats when there were passengers in, one or two of whom would generally object to live Rats being in the same compartment.’

The professional, Matthews, explains, ‘has always one resource open to him when he has‌ finished a job according to contract (catching say 40 or 50 Rats), should there be a dispute about the price and the people decline to pay the bill, then he has the expedient of letting the Rats at liberty again in the place where he had caught them. Most people will pay the price you send in rather than have the Rats turned loose again.’

Barkley, Henry C. (1896). Studies in the Art of Rat-Catching. London: John Murray.

Matthews, Ike (1898). Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-Catcher After 25 Years’ Experience. Manchester: The Friendly Societies’ Printing Company.

May we recommend

‘Determination of Favorite Components of Garbage by Dogs’

by Bonnie V. Beaver, Margaret Fischer and Charles E. Atkinson (published in Applied Behaviour Science, 1992)

The authors, at Texas A&M University and E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Orange, Texas, report: ‘This study was to determine which commonly found household garbage odors would be the most attractive to dogs. Thirteen items were tested as fresh odors or were aged for 72 h before testing. Each of the 325 paired odor combinations was tested on 12 dogs. Fresh odors were preferred to aged ones, and meat odors were chosen more often than non-meat odors. Fried liver with onions and baked chicken were the top ranking fresh and old odors. Liver was the highest ranking raw meat.’

An improbable innovation

‘Odor Testing Apparatus’

a/k/a cat-box-smell testing chambers, by Henry E. Lowe (US patent no. 4,411,156, granted 1983)

‌The apparatus in action

The art of unbuilding

The engineers who designed and built the very tallest, most skyscraping skyscrapers said very little about whether – let alone how – someone could safely disassemble such a colossus, should the need arise. About the only person who thought about it long and hard was the writer and illustrator David Macauley. Decades ago, Macauley published a children’s book called Unbuilding. It explains, in words and highly detailed drawings, how to carefully, lovingly take apart the Empire State Building.

In the race to build ever-taller buildings, a problem lurks. These towers are so costly, and the real estate market unpredictable enough, that some of them could become financial failures. To simply abandon something nearly a quarter of a mile tall (the Empire State Building), then let it rot and crumble, would be unneighbourly on a grand scale.

Indeed, how would one disassemble one of the tallest skyscrapers without risking huge damage to its neighbourhood? And how would this work financially, if the tower needed to be disassembled because the owners ran out of money?

David Macauley tells how, if you have the money, to unbuild in a way that is ‘practical and safe’. You take the building down ‘floor by floor in the reverse order in which it had been built’.

These days, architecturally, things are looking up. The tallest building, currently the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, at 829.8 metres (2,722 feet) high is more than twice the height of the Empire State Building. In August 2011, the architecture firm Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill announced plans to erect something even taller, the 1,000-metre-tall Kingdom Tower, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Financially … well, it’s a thrilling time for new skyscraper-owners, and perhaps soon for their neighbours.

The book Unbuilding, published in 1980, is a fantasy about the future. In it, the ‘Greater Riyadh Institute of Petroleum’ needs a new headquarters. A Saudi Arabian prince decides, for symbolic purposes, to purchase the Empire State Building, and move it from New York City to Riyadh. (He chooses, on the basis of cost, to transport only those ‘portions of the building necessary to recreate its appearance’, and build everything else.)

New Yorkers are at first outraged at the thought of losing their most beloved building. But after the Prince Ali offers the city new parks, museums, and other compensation, nearly everyone agrees to let him take the Empire State Building.

The book at this point has a passage that reads very differently than it did in 1980: ‘One desperate but clever preservationist suggested that the twin towers of the World Trade Center be offered instead – both for the price of the Empire State. In declining the offer Ali suggested that he would be willing to consider pulling them down as a goodwill gesture. With this final show of generosity all remaining resistance crumbled.’

Macauley, David (1980). Unbuilding. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

In brief

‘The Exploding Toilet and Other Emergency Room Folklore’

by Robert D. Slay (published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine, 1986)

How to remove the unmentionable, digitally

Nurses, among the most respected persons in our society, must acquire some skills that non-medical people find embarrassing, disgusting and maybe even childish. Such knowledge can be difficult to obtain from the standard medical books and journals. A monograph called ‘How to Perform a Digital Removal of Faeces’ aims to remedy one such gap in the literature.

Gaye Kyle, a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Health and Human Science at Thames Valley University in Slough, researched the subject in depth. She published her findings in the journal Continence Essentials.

There exists an official document that purports to provide the digital-removal information a nurse needs to know. But Kyle finds that document wanting. She complains that ‘The publication of “Digital Rectal Examination and Manual Removal of Faeces – Guidance for Nurses by the Royal College of Nursing” addressed many issues concerning the professional and legal aspects of the manual (digital) removal of faeces. However, the document did not give detailed guidance on how to actually carry out the procedure.’

Kyle is can do when it comes to how to. What must be discussed, she discusses, prissy diplomatic mincing be damned. ‘Digital removal of faeces is a procedure that many healthcare workers are not confident about performing’, she writes. ‘However, in some patients it is a necessary part of their routine bowel care.’

Some aspects of the situation strike her as dangerous and ludicrous. ‘Some nurses are actively refusing to undertake digital removal of faeces on spinal cord injury patients either because they have not been trained or, even more alarmingly, because they think they are not allowed to perform the procedure at all.’

Kyle uses plain language to describe the entire procedure, listing twenty-five distinct, specific actions. These range from the philosophical to the hands-in. For each action, she states a rationale, removing the guesswork that would stymie many a novice or unconfident health care professional.

Why should one ensure privacy? ‘To help the patient relax and minimise embarrassment’.

Why should one ‘place water-based lubricating gel on gloved index finger … for patients receiving this procedure on a regular basis’? The reason is practical and also common-sensical: ‘To facilitate easier insertion of index finger’.

Kyle explicates technical minutiae, but only when and where such is needed to provide a clear, unambiguous understanding. ‘Gently rotate the finger 6–8 times in a clockwise motion and withdraw’, she directs, then goes on to tell how many times the rotation may be repeated, and how many or few minutes should be allowed between each round of stimulation.

Gaye Kyle has given us a case study in the way vital knowledge can remain hidden and difficult to get at, especially when it pertains to matters or matter that can remain hidden and difficult to get at.

Kyle, Gaye (2008). ‘How to Perform a Digital Removal of Faeces’. Continence Essentials 1: 126–30.

Irwin, Karen (2008). ‘Digital Rectal Examination & Manual Removal of Faeces’. NHS Primary Care Trust Bolton, February, http://www.docstoc.com/docs/71006826/Digital-Rectal-Examination-_-Manual-Removal-of-Faeces.

May we recommend

‘Colonic Gas Explosion: Is a Fire Extinguisher Necessary?’

by J.H. Bond and M.D. Levitt (published in Gastroenterology, 1979)