Stiff: A book review

I listened to the audiobook version of "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach. What a treat. Am I a sicko, or what?

In her explorations into how human cadavers are used, Mary tells us - in gruesome detail - about many of her site visits. These include a cosmetic surgery workshop (for anatomical education), a human-remains research "farm" (used to infer time of death), and a tissue digestion company (an alternative to cremation). She also outlines a lot of the history around early anatomists, and how they used to hire body-snatchers to supply corpses by digging fresh graves, or otherwise.

One of my favourite parts of the book is her chapter on head transplants. Umm, make that "body transplants". Not done on humans, but on dogs and monkeys. I even took the time to look up the 1971 Surgery paper she described, entitled "Cephalic exchange transplantation in the monkey" by Robert J. White et al, which is where this rather disturbing figure comes from.


Mary has a humourous candor that comes out effortlessly from Shelly Frasier's reading. I highly recommend this book, if you have a strong stomach and a fascination with the macabre.

Recycling tautology

In the washrooms on the campus of the University of Waterloo, all the paper-towel dispensers have been replaced with ones that look like this...



The front face of each unit displays the following environmental feel-good message:



Hmm... isn't EVERYTHING made of "up to 100% post-consumer material"? I've never heard of something being made out of more than 100% of anything. Rather than an upper-bound on the amount of recycling, wouldn't a lower-bound be more informative? For example, they could use zero recycled material, and still claim that they use "up to 100% post-consumer material".

On the more positive side, perhaps the paper-towels are entirely made of recycled material, but they wish to point out that a large portion of it comes from post-consumer material (that would have been garbage), as opposed to materials recycled from factories, etc.

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