Venomite Tom forwarded today’s mind-bender:

read more »

Refried beans make me, well, gassy. Gas, I seem to recall, is lighter than air.

So doesn’t it make sense that if, say, I have tortilla chips with bean dip to the point I get, well, gassy, I ought to be able to stand on my bathroom scale and weigh less?

For the first time in recorded history, the ocean has wholly consumed an inhabited island.

The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

I remember living in our beach house in Hawaii, watching as our shoreline disappeared a little more with each storm. (Some of you will remember that it even made the news there.) By the time we’d left, we’d lost the majority of palm trees that had onced lined our shoreline.

Now, I’m in frequent touch with the couple who bought our old house. Turns out, the erosion only got worse and they had to install sandbags — at great expense — to protect the shore. Of course, the island’s bureaucracy first required them to jump through numerous hoops to get permission, and even now that the sandbags are there, the red tape is nowhere near its end.

Is all this due to global warming, or is it just the eventual alteration of land by the incessant demands of the sea? I, for one, haven’t the slightest idea. But I’m going to do my patriotic part to combat it: I’m going to eat beef.

As a parent, I’m aware that I am occasionally over-protective. I just about flipped when my husband allowed my teenage daughter’s boyfriend (who has only had his license for 3 months) to drive her to Homecoming. (Not surprisingly, she never bothered to ask my permission but went straight to him.) I set our v-Chip to block out anything more risque than a G-rating before 10 p.m. just in case my 6-year-old son wanders into the room. I’m even incapable of walking into the house without immediately locking the door behind me thanks to all those awful news stories about kids being kidnapped right out of the own homes. All too often, I find myself thinking “How much easier it was to keep them safe when my kids were just babies!”

Apparently, I’m out of the loop, because all of the truly hyper-vigilant parents are signing their infants up for therapy.

Jean M. Thomas, a Washington, D.C., psychiatrist, recently saw a patient who was struggling with her emotions. She was agitated and couldn’t stop crying. She was recovering from an eating problem and had trouble forming relationships.

She was 11 months old.

Therapists are increasingly moving their treatments from the couch to the crib. While the field of infant mental health — which encompasses the study of children from birth through age three — has been around for decades, new research on everything from brain development to maternal depression is giving it a boost. A widely used mental health and development diagnostic manual for infants was revised last year for the first time since 1994 to include two new subsets of depression, five new subsets of anxiety disorders (including separation anxiety and social anxiety disorders) and six new subsets of feeding behavior disorders (including sensory food aversions and infantile anorexia).

By starting treatment as soon as possible — even before their patients are out of diapers — doctors feel they are helping kids become better adjusted.

Not a bad racket: bill $150 per hour to treat a patient who’s quite likely to sleep through the appointment and can neither tell you what the problem is nor whether the “treatment” is helping.