TWIC is absolutely required weekly reading for me (I’m not much of a podcast person, so I’m particularly grateful for the transcript). Thank you very much for giving continued voice to the medical conservative position, and for your brand of informed skepticism.
I always have a bit of - ok a lot of - distrust in FDA since “FDA approval” means little more than “business deal made” these days. It’s nice to see a) rigorous science being accepted there and b) a fantastic commitment by a doctor just south of me here in Indiana jumping - err, biking - into that arena and reporting it. Thank you sir.
Every year, thousands of bikes are tossed into rivers, ponds, lakes and canals.
What’s behind this mass drowning?...In Amsterdam, drowned bikes were at one time heaped so high in the city’s 165 canals that they scraped the underside of flat-bottomed barges.
The solution was fietsen vissen, “bicycle fishing”.
In the old days, this task was accomplished by freelance scavengers who plied the canals in rowboats, using hooked poles to extract bikes, which were sold for scrap.
In the 1960s, Amsterdam’s water agency assumed responsibility for bicycle fishing.
These days, a corps of municipal workers trawl for drowned bikes on boats equipped with cranes attached to hydraulic claw grapples.
The problem is not as severe as it once was, but fishers still pull 15,000 bicycles from the canals each year.
It is a unique Amsterdam spectacle that never fails to draw a crowd of onlookers: the big metal claw rising out of the water with a dripping haul of wheels and frames and handlebar baskets.The bikes are dropped into garbage barges and transported to scrapyards for recycling.
It is said that many of the recycled bikes are turned into beer cans.
...Alcohol surely plays a role, and there could well be a kind of ecosystem at work: a bicycle is pulled from the canal and recycled into a beer can, whose contents are guzzled by an Amsterdammer, who, weaving home at the end of a dissipated night, spots a bicycle and is seized by an impulse to hurl the thing into a canal.
The writer Pete Jordan, in his charming book about Amsterdam and cycling, In the City of Bikes,
devotes several pages to bicycle drowning, linking it, in part, to the city’s tumultuous political history. In the 1930s, communists pranked fascists by tossing their bicycles into the Prinsengracht,
the “Prince’s Canal”; during the German occupation in the second world war, resistance leaders called on Amsterdammers to dump their bicycles into canals to keep them from falling into the hands of the Nazis, who were confiscating bikes....
The situation in Amsterdam is perhaps best explained by simple maths.
There are an estimated 2m bicycles in the city and 30 miles of canals,
and logic dictates that there will be some spillover of one into the other.
When an Amsterdammer needs to get rid of an old bicycle,
a waterway will often provide the most convenient dumpster.
The Dutch newspaper Trouw
once characterised Amsterdam’s canals
as “those traditional garbage cans where we take our visitors on boat trips”.
agreed, r m, & a dearth of vit&min is another kettle of fish, viz...
'It is true that hypomagnesaemia predisposes to arrhythmias, but it has been described as the “jack of all trades”, when it comes to the treatment of specific arrhythmias and the treatment of many other arrhythmias in the ICU setting. The rationale being that low levels of magnesium predispose to arrhythmias (particularly ventricular) or at least predispose an already existing arrhythmia to become uncontrolled...'
TWIC is absolutely required weekly reading for me (I’m not much of a podcast person, so I’m particularly grateful for the transcript). Thank you very much for giving continued voice to the medical conservative position, and for your brand of informed skepticism.
I always have a bit of - ok a lot of - distrust in FDA since “FDA approval” means little more than “business deal made” these days. It’s nice to see a) rigorous science being accepted there and b) a fantastic commitment by a doctor just south of me here in Indiana jumping - err, biking - into that arena and reporting it. Thank you sir.
yikes, DrM,don't look down...🇳🇱 bikes in ' picturesque grachten of old Amsterdam' youtube.com/watch?v=SSEahShEZz0
Boat crane fishes bicycle wrecks from Amsterdam canals
Rumble Viral
---
www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jul/28/bicycle-graveyards-why-do-so-many-bikes-end-up-underwater
Every year, thousands of bikes are tossed into rivers, ponds, lakes and canals.
What’s behind this mass drowning?...In Amsterdam, drowned bikes were at one time heaped so high in the city’s 165 canals that they scraped the underside of flat-bottomed barges.
The solution was fietsen vissen, “bicycle fishing”.
In the old days, this task was accomplished by freelance scavengers who plied the canals in rowboats, using hooked poles to extract bikes, which were sold for scrap.
In the 1960s, Amsterdam’s water agency assumed responsibility for bicycle fishing.
These days, a corps of municipal workers trawl for drowned bikes on boats equipped with cranes attached to hydraulic claw grapples.
The problem is not as severe as it once was, but fishers still pull 15,000 bicycles from the canals each year.
It is a unique Amsterdam spectacle that never fails to draw a crowd of onlookers: the big metal claw rising out of the water with a dripping haul of wheels and frames and handlebar baskets.The bikes are dropped into garbage barges and transported to scrapyards for recycling.
It is said that many of the recycled bikes are turned into beer cans.
...Alcohol surely plays a role, and there could well be a kind of ecosystem at work: a bicycle is pulled from the canal and recycled into a beer can, whose contents are guzzled by an Amsterdammer, who, weaving home at the end of a dissipated night, spots a bicycle and is seized by an impulse to hurl the thing into a canal.
The writer Pete Jordan, in his charming book about Amsterdam and cycling, In the City of Bikes,
[ www.amazon.com/City-Bikes-Story-Amsterdam-Cyclist/dp/0061995207 ]
devotes several pages to bicycle drowning, linking it, in part, to the city’s tumultuous political history. In the 1930s, communists pranked fascists by tossing their bicycles into the Prinsengracht,
the “Prince’s Canal”; during the German occupation in the second world war, resistance leaders called on Amsterdammers to dump their bicycles into canals to keep them from falling into the hands of the Nazis, who were confiscating bikes....
The situation in Amsterdam is perhaps best explained by simple maths.
There are an estimated 2m bicycles in the city and 30 miles of canals,
and logic dictates that there will be some spillover of one into the other.
When an Amsterdammer needs to get rid of an old bicycle,
a waterway will often provide the most convenient dumpster.
The Dutch newspaper Trouw
once characterised Amsterdam’s canals
as “those traditional garbage cans where we take our visitors on boat trips”.
---
www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2018/may/01/unexpected-beauty-china-bicycle-graveyards-share-bikes-in-pictures
I am not a big supporter of allopathic medicine, I have never met a patient who had a deficiency of drugs in their body, and needed drugs.
agreed, r m, & a dearth of vit&min is another kettle of fish, viz...
'It is true that hypomagnesaemia predisposes to arrhythmias, but it has been described as the “jack of all trades”, when it comes to the treatment of specific arrhythmias and the treatment of many other arrhythmias in the ICU setting. The rationale being that low levels of magnesium predispose to arrhythmias (particularly ventricular) or at least predispose an already existing arrhythmia to become uncontrolled...'
youtube.com/watch?v=3wtUn1gWgaw
'Signs and Symptoms of Magnesium Deficiency'
Peter Osborne
Good stuff!