09 January 2013

Tree of Science, January 9

Today we find a beer bottle beneath the Tree of Science.
It's hard to imagine how a beer bottle ends up in the snow, finished and upright.  Did the owner sit in the slush beneath the tree and finish it off?  Or was it carefully carried to its resting spot and left to recycle itself.  I'm not sure whether large Bavarian bottles are covered by the Massachusetts recycling act, but they should.  (Recently the town of Concord banned single serving bottled water, which are not covered by Massachusetts recycling laws.)

It's timely, I suppose, coming after a study is released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that reports that one in eight women in the US consume six or more drinks in a single sitting, three times per month.  Men are no better, of course, but it's particularly worrisome for young women who are more likely to be drawn to beer-like drinks made with higher alcohol content.  It seems there are links between heavy drinking and breast cancer.

It's nice, however, to see that our students (can we assume it was a student?) are leaving the Keystone Light behind.  It's sad to see a student (surely of age) leaving the liquor store with 48 cans of inexpensive beer when a smaller number of quality labels could be had at the same price.  There's an inductive proof in all of this, somewhere.