For anyone who reads the Salt Lake City Weekly you may have already heard of Cecil Adams and his column, The Straight Dope. For fun this morning I perused his website by the same name. I found this gem from 1986: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/417/is-the-great-wall-of-china-the-.... This reminds me of one of my favorite LDS myths (unrelated/off-topic, so don’t anyone get offended, please). As a child I was told how brilliant Brigham Young had been to tell the Utah settlers to build with adobe. It was cheap, and according to LDS myth, “a great insulator.” (This is still being perpetrated by the Blessed Sisters of Temple Square in their tours at Brigham Young’s SLC residence, the Beehive House. Go take a tour if you doubt it. You’ll hear other LDS myths, too.) For anyone who cares, and for the record, adobe is NOT an insulating material at all. It would take a 50-inch-thick adobe wall to approximate the insulation value of a typical 2x6 exterior wall in modern construction. Adobe’s favorable properties as a building material come largely from its thermal mass. I won’t bore everyone with details, but if you’re interested, here’s a good discussion of the thermal properties of adobe: http://www.quentinwilson.com/adobe-as-mass/. FWIW, I live in a house partially built of adobe and my pioneer ancestors built houses of adobe. I am proud of my LDS heritage, even when myths are told about them. Merry belated Christmas to everyone, and Happy New Year. Kim