Betrand Russel once said, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wise people so full of doubt.”  That was the lesson from a Guys Read book that Tom Gross (of TommyG’s fame) and I read to fourth grade boys last week.  The book’s hero, a pig, is the descendent of a family of porcine vampire hunters who’d met their demises by being as foolish as they were brave.  Titled “Ham Helsing, Vampire Hunter,” it was doubly suitable, being silly enough to engage our audience and because Tom’s smoked hams have won national and international awards. The line between foolishness and bravery can be mighty fine, but sometimes there’s no question about it.  Take the Darwin Awards that, according to their website, from 1992 to 2022, honored “those who tip chlorine into our gene pool, by accidentally removing their own DNA from it during the spectacular climax of a ‘great idea’ gone veddy, veddy wrong.”   They note that “This is all in jest,” but their section on the rules contestants are judged by include being human, causing their own demise or sterility, , prove a “sublimely idiotic misapplication of judgment,” be “capable of sound judgment, and “the event must be true.”  For example, a Brazilian man became a confirmed Darwin winner when he “tried to disassemble a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) by driving back and forth over it with a car. This technique was ineffective, so he escalated to pounding the RPG with a sledgehammer. The second try worked–in a sense. The explosion proved fatal to one man, six cars, and the repair shop wherein the efforts took place.”

            For bravery look no further than Bass Reeves, who was born a slave in 1838.  The Oklahoma Historical Society article on him states, “As a young man Bass Reeves escaped north into the Indian Territory, and he became acquainted with the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole ….   Reeves settled down in Van Buren, Arkansas, as a farmer. On occasion he would serve as a guide for deputy U.S. marshals who worked out of the federal court at Fort Smith, Arkansas, into the Indian Territory ….  as a result of his skills and his knowledge of the territory, he was able to make substantial money as a scout and tracker for peace officers. In 1875, when Judge Isaac C. Parker [the “hanging judge’] took over the Fort Smith federal court, Parker commissioned Reeves as a deputy U.S. marshal. He is believed to be one of the earliest African Americans to receive a commission as a deputy U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi River.  Reeves worked for thirty-two years as a deputy marshal in the Indian Territory …. Reeves, standing six feet, two inches tall and weighing 180 pounds, became a celebrity during his lifetime in the Indian Territory. Muskogee Police Chief Bud Ledbetter said about him, “The veteran Negro deputy never quailed in facing any man …. The greatest testimony to his devotion to duty was the fact he brought his own son in for murder once he received the warrant.”

            The Global Oreo Vault might have been merely foolish if it hadn’t been such a successful publicity stunt.  An asteroid that astronomers said was extremely unlikely to hit earth on November 2 or 3 in 2020 and was too small to cause any damage if it did was impetus enough to erect a special vault that held a supply of Oreo cookies packed in Mylar along with the cookie’s recipe and powdered milk.  The vault was built to resemble a “significantly smaller” version of the nearby the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV).  A Food & Wine article on the Oreo Vault noted that “Since 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in a remote Norway island has served as one of the last lines of defense against the annihilation of plant life on Earth. The secure facility, built into the side of a mountain, holds over one million seed samples, offering hope that if all other existence of a crop is wiped out, a final backup will still be available.”  Despite the asteroid’s non-threatening nature, Oreo ad execs emphasized the mylar packaging could “withstand temperatures from -80 degrees to 300 degrees Fahrenheit and is impervious to chemical reactions, moisture and air, keeping the cookies fresh and protected for years to come.”   The SGSV is essentially a seed library that “provides insurance against both incremental and catastrophic loss of crop diversity held in traditional genebanks around the world. The Seed Vault offers long-term protection for one of the most important natural resources on earth,” according to Crop Trust (“an international non-profit organization dedicated to conserving and making crop diversity available for use globally, forever and for the benefit of everyone”).  It “has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples. Each sample contains an average count of 500 seeds, so a maximum of 2.25 billion seeds can be stored in the facility.”

The Global Oreo Vault was dismantled a year or so later, but the Arctic World Archive (AWA) lives on. Offering “permafrost-cooled, carbon-neutral data storage center for all the history that has and will shape our world,” according to their website.  An archive is a type of library, but the AWA certainly is among the free public kind.  According to their website.  AWA was “launched in March 2017 by Piql AS, an innovative technology company located on mainland Norway” that “is the leading specialist provider of digital preservation and long-term data and file storage solutions. Backed by the European Union, it is well recognized for its innovative approach to keeping data well preserved with guaranteed future access.”  Like the SGSV, AWA is located “in a well-kept and safe decommissioned mine” in “a secure underground and unhackable data vault at the center of the permafrost, 300 meters inside the mine and 300 meters below the top of the mountain.”  Wikipedia adds that the AWA is supposed to protect from geomagnetic storms and is “located in the Svalbard archipelago on the island of Spitsbergen, Norway, not far from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault,” about 600 miles from the North Pole.  “Data is stored offline on film reels made using a refined version of ordinary darkroom photography technology. The film is made of polyester coated in silver halide crystals and powder-coated with iron oxide and has a life span of at least 500 and possibly up to 2,000 years, if stored in optimum conditions.”  However, relying on permafrost cooling seems foolish with the current rate of global warming, and the service isn’t free.  The Icecube option with 40 GB of storage space and one user costs €19 a month, the Iceberg level has one TB and five users for €39/mo., and the €129/mo. Glacier level has 5 TB and 10 users.  The AWA site stipulates that “a kind of ‘Rosetta Stone’ has been devised to help decode the data, in the form of a guide to interpreting the archive. The guides are all readable by eye, after magnification, and written in English, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, and Hindi.”

            It’s hard to judge from this point in time if the AWA is a brave technological initiative or an expensive piece of foolishness.  It’s crystal clear that Bass Reeves was clearly braver than foolish, as his 3,000 arrests and the 14 notches on his pistol handle attest.  Judging where on the bravery-foolishness continuum the Dutch partisan Oversteegen sisters fall is less obvious.  They’re described in “The Teenage Girl Gang That Seduced and Killed Nazis,” a Mental Floss article by Jake Rossen.  Sisters Freddie and Truus Oversteegen were raised by the single mom, Trijntje, a devoted communist who raised her girls to show compassion for those less fortunate.  When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940, the family distributed anti-Nazi pamphlets and posters and housed Jews and other refugees until Trijntje felt their public opposition would lead to suspicion.  “Many were subsequently deported and killed.  This stirred a fire in Freddie and Truus.  When the leader of a Dutch resistance group took notice of their radical bent, he asked Trijntje if she would permit her daughters to join. Freddie was 14. Truus was 16. Without knowing explicitly what they were agreeing to, the three women all said yes. And soon, the teenage girls were doing more than handing out literature. They were luring Nazis into the woods and assassinating them.”  At first, they acted as bait, luring Nazi officer and Dutch collaborators into the woods where a partisan would do the killing.  “Freddie and Truus soon graduated to eliminating their own targets, which Freddie would later describe as ‘liquidations’. Sometimes the girls would ride a bicycle, Truus pedaling while Freddie shot from the back,” and they ambushed officers at home.  It’s “not known exactly how many Nazis the girls killed …. When asked, Freddie would respond with, “One should not ask a soldier any of that.”

A Popular Mechanics article, “We Used to Make Fun of Fool’s Gold.  Now It Might Fuel Our Future” is more upbeat describing how University of West Virginia scientists have found significant amounts of lithium mixed in with pyrites in shale tailings from oil and gas extractions.  Lithium’s an important rare element, but extracting it is costly and environmentally damaging while getting it from fool’s gold could be easier and cheaper.  But as the immortal Stooge Moe Howard put it, “Only fools are positive.”