Archives for April 2008

→ April 3, 2008
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The 13th Element + the return of KlawChat.

Phosphorus is highly toxic and flammable, forms compounds that explode on contact with oxygen, is the key ingredient in detergents and nerve gases, and is absolutely essential to life. It’s good fodder for what amounts to a biography of a chemical element, and John Emsley’s The 13th Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus is an excellent read.

Emsley focuses on four areas of phosphorus’ story: Its early history and manufacture, its valuable commercial uses, its less benevolent uses in explosives and chemical weapons, and its environmental reputation (not entirely deserved). The narrative is a bit clunky, and Emsley tends to veer off into list mode, rattling off a number of famous murder/poisoning cases involving phosphorus in one of the book’s later chapters, and one chapter seldom connects to the next. But most of the book is highly readable, with some of the more technical content siphoned off into sidebars, and it was news to me that phosphorus’s rap for causing eutrophication wasn’t entirely fair, and the history of phosphorus’ use in chemical weapons, including nerve gas, is sadly relevant today.

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I’ve got a 1 pm chat today on ESPN.com, and you can also hear a few minutes with me on today’s Baseball Today podcast.

Filed Under: Chat, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , ,
→ April 1, 2008
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On race and baseball.

This BP Unfiltered post from Kevin Goldstein is a must read.

My own experiences inside the game did, unfortunately, expose me to some of that unpleasant side of human behavior as well, and I was glad to see Kevin address it head on as he did.

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: ,
→ April 1, 2008
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ESPNEWS today.

Last-minute request from the ESPNEWS folk – I’ll be on at 3:20 EDT, less than an hour from now.

Filed Under: Appearances
→ April 1, 2008
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“What’s a rhubarb?” “It’s a plant.”

So Martha Stewart is making rhubarb desserts today – a fool (for April Fool’s Day, hah) and a grunt. But she said one thing that caught my attention:

The leaves are deadly poisonous … They are toxic, oxalic acid and you can really die from it. And you notice in the fields, at the farm, the horses never go near, the chickens, nobody goes near the rhubarb.

While it’s true that rhubarb leaves are poisonous the cause isn’t oxalic acid, which is found in many foods, including cocoa, spinach, carrots, and berries. Spinach contains enough to all but wipe out the calcium found in the vegetable, because oxalic acid combines with the calcium to form calcium oxalate, an insoluble compound that can build up and form stones in the kidney or gallbladder. If oxalic acid was the only toxin at work in rhubarb leaves, it would take several pounds to kill you.

It is possible, however, that there’s a second compound at work in rhubarb leaves that works with the oxalic acid to make them toxic. One suspect is a form of anthraquinone glycoside, which is present in rhubarb roots and has been used in traditional medicine as a laxative. The anthraquinone glycoside(s) in rhubarb leaves may work in tandem with the oxalic acid to have a toxic effect, although there doesn’t seem to be any hard evidence to back that up.

I have no idea why I posted this other than that I like rhubarb.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , ,