I heard it on the Belgian radio news, and now this from the on-line press so it must be true:

“Gambling Commission wants to allow players to smoke again in order to save casinos.”

For Belgian casinos – all nine of them – are in trouble, mainly for the usual reason of fierce online competition. One can always smoke at home (if the significant other there agrees), in front of the computer. If something is not done, argues Gambling Commission Head Peter Naessens, then punters will stay there to place their bets or, if they really desire that on-site gambling experience, will simply cross the border, presumably where they can both gamble and smoke.

So the proposal is to put in an exemption to the general smoking ban for enclosed public places of July, 2011, and thereby allow smoking again in Belgian casinos – that is, allow people to ruin their lungs (for the cigarette-makers’ profit) at the same time as they ruin their finances (for the casinos’ profit). This is really depraved; and both of these are potentially addictive behaviors!

The one hitch here may be that that 2011 ban came about as the result of a decision from the country’s Constitutional Court, which interpreted the relevant law to require that, if you are going to have a smoking ban at all, you enforce it for all public places, in the interest of equity and fair competition. Meanwhile, this particular article signs off with the reminder that “. . . the [gambling] sector is good for 5,000 jobs in our land.”

The Cologne Smoking Study (German only): An examination of why your after-shave seems to give off fumes? No; I’m afraid it’s nothing more lively than a study on smoking carried out by the Humanities and Medical faculties at the University of Cologne, covered here by Der Spiegel.

Still, it produced a surprising conclusion. Conventional wisdom has people smoking more the more they are under stress, but this study turns that on its head. How can that be? Silly, do keep in mind the wave of anti-smoking restrictions imposed in most EU countries from around 2005 on: these people are simply not allowed to smoke there in the office where they are struggling to meet deadline, and they don’t have time to get away somewhere where they may. So maybe they make up for it later, when the crisis is over? There’s no evidence for that.

Smokers should at least be relieved that this study stops well short of recommending any heightening of the stress-quotient among one’s employees as a means to get them to cut down on their tobacco consumption. Perhaps the thought in the back of their minds of the various diseases to which they are making themselves susceptible by their behavior – I won’t bother to list them here – has always been stressful enough.

Another interesting bit came up today on the site of the Dutch newspaper Trouw: Second-hand smoke is also harmful to the smoker. (I do like these miniscule on-line pieces from Trouw, that nevertheless usually manage to communicate a well-defined, thought-provoking point. This sort of material helps this blog to move closer to the aggregation function that has been suggested for it.)

Basically, while the health risks of second-hand smoke for non-smokers in the same general vicinity have been subject to exhaustive investigation, the impact of that smoke on the smokers who were emitting it in the first place has been neglected, on the assumption that they had enough health problems just taking into account their direct puffing. But no! A smoker may think he has smoked, say, fourteen cigarettes on a given evening – because he sees fourteen butts in the ashtray – but in reality the harmful effect on him is on the order of 16.6 cigarettes, precisely because of the second-hand smoke he created but then breathed in again.

This is out of a study from the (Italian) National Institute for Cancer Research, where they conducted their research on smoking newstand kiosk-owners, who sit there most of the day just smoking by themselves. But mathematicians out there will justifiably wonder whether 16.6 in that particular case is really the final figure, or whether it is instead even higher. After all, that second-hand smoke that you breathe in you then exhale again (making it third-hand smoke), which then you partially breathe in again, etc. etc. This sounds to me like an infinite sequence problem! (Which, as any good mathematician can tell you, under certain conditions will still yield a non-infinite, final answer.)

A notable topic covered lately in the Czech press is one of that country’s chief vices: smoking. That coverage does not really concern the associated damage to one’s health and the fact that anyone who can quit really should – the Czechs know about all that already. Rather, what has occurred is two recent developments with seemingly opposite meanings for the country’s smoking classes, but which in the end still basically leave them gasping for air. (more…)

In its continual quest for innovation, today EuroSavant reverses the matrix, so to speak. (No, not “Matrix” – there will be no more discussion here of that pseudo-philosophical, black-leather-and-Ray-bans film series). Usually I take a topic and go see what newspapers in a given national press have to say about it. Granted, occasionally it’s just “newspaper.” Today, though, I present you reporting from today’s Volkskrant on a couple of topics – a smoker’s responsibility, a singing trash can – mainly because, as far as I can tell, that paper is alone in staying on top of these vital issues.

To start with: Did you know that, when someone who has smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for most of his life dies prematurely from cancer, that is basically his own damn fault? You can read all about it in Gauloises Home-Free from Lung Cancer. (more…)