Guy Turned An Old Van Into “Adventuremobile” (61 pics)

Imgur user worked on this old van for four months on week-ends and every evening after work and now that it is done, he is all excited to embark on adventurous journeys with it. "I spent the last 4 months building an adventuremobile on the weekends and evenings after work. Building this van was at times overwhelming, but always exciting. The experience has taught me many things and I am excited for the adventures to come. I hope you enjoy this tour. -Evan"

"The finished van/tiny home. It weighs in at 6,600 lbs. Well under the GVWR of 8,600 lbs. The total build added 1,300 lbs."

"Cleared out and ready to get started. It took a day to rip out all the factory trim and riveted cargo rails. I made a dump run to get rid of it."

Bathing Machines of The 19th Century

Back in the 18th and 19th century, the ladies just couldn't strip to their swimwear and run towards the waves on the beach. There are certain sea-side etiquettes that needed to be observed and decorum to be maintained. Getting oneself seen in their bathing costumes by the members of the opposite sex was certainly not one of them.

To help women maintain their modesty and dignity, a simple contraption called the “bathing machine” was developed. A bathing machine resembled a wooden changing room commonly seen on beaches, but larger in size, and raised on wheels and with steps leading to the inside. The female bather would enter the small room of the machine while it was on the beach, wearing their street clothing. In the privacy of the machine, she would change into her bathing dress, which was exceedingly modest compared to today’s standards, and place her street clothes into a raised compartment where they would remain dry.

Are Organic Foods Healthier?

The medical literature has been historically hostile to organic foods, blaming in part erroneous information supplied by the health food movement for our ignorance of nutrition. But until just a few generations ago, all food was organic. So it’s kind of ironic that what we now call conventional food really isn’t very conventional for our species.

By eating organic we can reduce our exposure to pesticides, but it remains unclear whether such a reduction in exposure is clinically relevant.  Organic produce was found to have higher antioxidant and antimutagenic activity combined with better inhibition of cancer cell proliferation, but in terms of studies on actual people rather than petri dishes, there isn’t much science either way.

Why can’t you just compare the health of those that buy organic to those that don’t? Organic consumers do report being significantly healthier than conventional consumers, but they also tend to eat more plant foods in general and less soda and alcohol, processed meat, or milk, and just eat healthier in general.  

Therefore, there is an urgent need for interventional trials, or studies following cohorts of people eating organic over time like the Million Women Study in the UK, the first to examine the association between the consumption of organic food and subsequent risk of cancer. The only significant risk reduction they found, though, was for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. This is consistent with data showing a higher risk of developing lymphoma in those who have higher levels of pesticides stored in their butt fat, a study performed because farmworkers have been found to have higher rates of lymphoma.

Parental farmworker exposure is also associated with a birth defect of the penis called hypospadias, and so researchers decided to see if moms who failed to choose organic were at increased risk. And indeed they found that frequent consumption of conventional high fat dairy products was associated with about double the odds of the birth defect. This could just be because those that choose organic have other related healthy behaviors, or it could be that high fat foods like dairy products bioamplify the fat-soluble toxicants in our environment.

There are two other general population pesticide studies that have raised concerns. One that found about a 50 to 70 percent increase in the odds of ADHD among children with pesticide levels in their urine common among US children, and another that found triple the odds of testicular cancer among men with higher levels of organochlorine pesticides in their blood. Ninety percent of such pollutants comes from fish, meat, and dairy, which may help explain rising testicular cancer rates in many western countries since World War II.

What about interventional trials? All we have in the medical literature so far are studies showing organically grown food provides health benefits to fruit flies raised on diets of conventional versus organic produce when subjected to a variety of tests designed to assess overall fly health. And what do you know, flies raised on diets made from organically grown produce lived longer. Hmm, insects eating insecticides don’t do as well? Not exactly much of a breakthrough.